"The real answer is to resolve a Mind Projection Fallacy; physics follows a single line, but your search system, in determining its best action, has to search through multiple options not knowing which it will make real, and all the options will be labeled as reachable in the search."
This is rather silly. You could replace "physics" with "time", or "causality", or something like it, and the fallacy is obvious. All one knows about physics is that it has always followed a single line in some specific situations. In some others, as simple as statistical mecanics, this "line" gets really blurred. You seem to argue, in the other post, that counterfactuals are a mental construct used for reasoning, but actually unreal, because, you know, a counterfactual never happenned.
No one is saying could-able things have happenned (or at least I hope no one is). This looks awfully lot like some generalized hidsight bias when looking at the universe. My take is you still don't understand the concept of possibility (and I'm not claiming I do, by the way); reducing it to symbolic reasoning doesn't make it any clearer (although, granted, it does explain one curious fact about people: that it's very easy to talk about things "wanting" and "desiring" and "thinking" when these things are following deterministic tracks. Think of how most people describe countries, or companies, or water).
Moreover, your previous post has done nothing to dispell the illusion that free will is this extra-natural god-given gift, or something like it. It hasn't even completely reduced it to determinism, in my opinion.
Also, Eliezer, I really preferred the older posts, recently the writing here is too dogmatic for me.
"The real answer is to resolve a Mind Projection Fallacy; physics follows a single line, but your search system, in determining its best action, has to search through multiple options not knowing which it will make real, and all the options will be labeled as reachable in the search."
This is rather silly. You could replace "physics" with "time", or "causality", or something like it, and the fallacy is obvious. All one knows about physics is that it has always followed a single line in some specific situations. In some others, as simple as statistical mecanics, this "line" gets really blurred. You seem to argue, in the other post, that counterfactuals are a mental construct used for reasoning, but actually unreal, because, you know, a counterfactual never happenned.
No one is saying could-able things have happenned (or at least I hope no one is). This looks awfully lot like some generalized hidsight bias when looking at the universe. My take is you still don't understand the concept of possibility (and I'm not claiming I do, by the way); reducing it to symbolic reasoning doesn't make it any clearer (although, granted, it does explain one curious fact about people: that it's very easy to talk about things "wanting" and "desiring" and "thinking" when these things are following deterministic tracks. Think of how most people describe countries, or companies, or water).
Moreover, your previous post has done nothing to dispell the illusion that free will is this extra-natural god-given gift, or something like it. It hasn't even completely reduced it to determinism, in my opinion.
Also, Eliezer, I really preferred the older posts, recently the writing here is too dogmatic for me.