I’m not sure what you mean by CDT- and EDT-style counterfactuals. I have some guesses but please clarify. I think EDT-style counterfactual means, assuming I am a bayesian reasoner, just conditioning on the event “TAI won’t come”, so it’s thinking about the distribution P(O | TAI won’t come).
One could think that the CDT-counterfactual you’re considering means thinking about the distribution P(O | do(TAI doesn’t come)) where do is the do operator from Judea Pearl’s do calculus for causality. In simple words, this means that we consider the world just like ours but whenever someone tries to launch a TAI, god’s intervention (that doesn’t make sense together with everything we know about physics) prevents it from working. But I think this is not what you mean.
My best guess of what counterfactual you mean is as follows. Among all possible sets laws of physics (or, alternatively, Turing machines running which leads to existence of physical realities), you guess that there exists a set of laws that produces a physical reality where there will appear a civilization approximately (but not exactly) like hours and they’ll have a 21-st century approximately like hours, but under their physical laws there won’t be TAI. And you want to analyze what’s going to happen with that civilization.
I’m not sure what you mean by CDT- and EDT-style counterfactuals. I have some guesses but please clarify. I think EDT-style counterfactual means, assuming I am a bayesian reasoner, just conditioning on the event “TAI won’t come”, so it’s thinking about the distribution P(O | TAI won’t come).
One could think that the CDT-counterfactual you’re considering means thinking about the distribution P(O | do(TAI doesn’t come)) where do is the do operator from Judea Pearl’s do calculus for causality. In simple words, this means that we consider the world just like ours but whenever someone tries to launch a TAI, god’s intervention (that doesn’t make sense together with everything we know about physics) prevents it from working. But I think this is not what you mean.
My best guess of what counterfactual you mean is as follows. Among all possible sets laws of physics (or, alternatively, Turing machines running which leads to existence of physical realities), you guess that there exists a set of laws that produces a physical reality where there will appear a civilization approximately (but not exactly) like hours and they’ll have a 21-st century approximately like hours, but under their physical laws there won’t be TAI. And you want to analyze what’s going to happen with that civilization.