Ok, so you find yourself in this situation where the Truth Tester has verified that the Predictor is accurate, and you’ve verified that the Truth Tester is accurate, and the Predictor tells you that the direction you’re about to turn your head has a perfect correspondence to the orbit of some particular asteroid. Lacking the orbit information yourself, you now have a subjective link between your next action and the asteroid’s path.
This case does appear to present some difficulty for me.
I think this case isn’t actually so different from the previous case, because although you don’t know the source code of the Predictor, you might reasonably suspect that the Predictor picks out an asteroid after predicting you (or, selects the equation relating your head movement to the asteroid orbit after picking out the asteroid). We might suspect this precisely because it is implausible that the asteroid is actually mirroring our computation in a more significant sense. So using a Truth Teller intermediary increases the uncertainty of the situation, but increased uncertainty is compatible with the same resolution.
What your revision does do, though, is highlight how the counterfactual expectation has to differ from the evidential conditional. We may think “the Predictor would have selected a different asteroid (or different equation) if its computation of our action had turned out different”, but, we now know the asteroid (and the equation); so, our evidential expectation is clearly that the asteroid has a different orbit depending on our choice of action. Yet, it seems like the sensible counterfactual expectation given the situation is … hm.
Actually, now I don’t think it’s quite that the evidential and counterfactual expectation come apart. Since you don’t know what you actually do yet, there’s no reason for you to tie any particular asteroid to any particular action. So, it’s not that in your state of uncertainty choice of action covaries with choice of asteroid (via some particular mapping). Rather, you suspect that there is such a mapping, whatever that means.
In any case, this difficulty was already present without the Truth Teller serving as intermediary: the Predictor’s choice of box is already known, so even though it is sensible to think of the chosen box as what counterfactually varies based on choice of action, on-the-spot what makes sense (evidentially) is to anticipate the same box having different contents.
So, the question is: what’s my naive functionalist position supposed to be? What sense of “varies with” is supposed to necessitate the presence of a copy of me in the (logico-)causal ancestry of an event?
Ok, so you find yourself in this situation where the Truth Tester has verified that the Predictor is accurate, and you’ve verified that the Truth Tester is accurate, and the Predictor tells you that the direction you’re about to turn your head has a perfect correspondence to the orbit of some particular asteroid. Lacking the orbit information yourself, you now have a subjective link between your next action and the asteroid’s path.
This case does appear to present some difficulty for me.
I think this case isn’t actually so different from the previous case, because although you don’t know the source code of the Predictor, you might reasonably suspect that the Predictor picks out an asteroid after predicting you (or, selects the equation relating your head movement to the asteroid orbit after picking out the asteroid). We might suspect this precisely because it is implausible that the asteroid is actually mirroring our computation in a more significant sense. So using a Truth Teller intermediary increases the uncertainty of the situation, but increased uncertainty is compatible with the same resolution.
What your revision does do, though, is highlight how the counterfactual expectation has to differ from the evidential conditional. We may think “the Predictor would have selected a different asteroid (or different equation) if its computation of our action had turned out different”, but, we now know the asteroid (and the equation); so, our evidential expectation is clearly that the asteroid has a different orbit depending on our choice of action. Yet, it seems like the sensible counterfactual expectation given the situation is … hm.
Actually, now I don’t think it’s quite that the evidential and counterfactual expectation come apart. Since you don’t know what you actually do yet, there’s no reason for you to tie any particular asteroid to any particular action. So, it’s not that in your state of uncertainty choice of action covaries with choice of asteroid (via some particular mapping). Rather, you suspect that there is such a mapping, whatever that means.
In any case, this difficulty was already present without the Truth Teller serving as intermediary: the Predictor’s choice of box is already known, so even though it is sensible to think of the chosen box as what counterfactually varies based on choice of action, on-the-spot what makes sense (evidentially) is to anticipate the same box having different contents.
So, the question is: what’s my naive functionalist position supposed to be? What sense of “varies with” is supposed to necessitate the presence of a copy of me in the (logico-)causal ancestry of an event?