Phil, your commitment ahead of time is your own private business, your own cognitive ritual. What you need in order to determine the past in the right way is that you are known to perform a certain action in the end. Whether you are arranging it so that you’ll perform that action by making a prior commitment and then having to choose the actions because of the penalty, or simply following a timeless decision theory, so that you don’t need to bother with prior commitments outside of your cognitive algorithm, is irrelevant. If you are known to follow timeless decision theory, it’s just as good as if you are known to have made a commitment. You could say that embracing timeless decision theory is a global meta-commitment, that makes you act as if you made commitment in all the situations where you benefit from having made the commitment.
For example, one-off prisoner’s dilemma can be resolved to mutual cooperation by both players making a commitment of huge negative utility in case the other player cooperates and you defect. This commitment doesn’t fire in the real world, since its presence makes both players cooperate. The presence of this commitment leads to a better outcome for both players, so it’s always rational to make it. Exactly the same effect can be achieved by both players following the timeless decision theory, only without the need to bother arranging that commitment in the environment (which could prove ruinous in case of advanced intelligence, since commitment is essentially intelligence playing adversarial game in the environment against itself).
Phil, your commitment ahead of time is your own private business, your own cognitive ritual. What you need in order to determine the past in the right way is that you are known to perform a certain action in the end. Whether you are arranging it so that you’ll perform that action by making a prior commitment and then having to choose the actions because of the penalty, or simply following a timeless decision theory, so that you don’t need to bother with prior commitments outside of your cognitive algorithm, is irrelevant. If you are known to follow timeless decision theory, it’s just as good as if you are known to have made a commitment. You could say that embracing timeless decision theory is a global meta-commitment, that makes you act as if you made commitment in all the situations where you benefit from having made the commitment.
For example, one-off prisoner’s dilemma can be resolved to mutual cooperation by both players making a commitment of huge negative utility in case the other player cooperates and you defect. This commitment doesn’t fire in the real world, since its presence makes both players cooperate. The presence of this commitment leads to a better outcome for both players, so it’s always rational to make it. Exactly the same effect can be achieved by both players following the timeless decision theory, only without the need to bother arranging that commitment in the environment (which could prove ruinous in case of advanced intelligence, since commitment is essentially intelligence playing adversarial game in the environment against itself).