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JGWeissman comments on Decision theory: Why we need to reduce “could”, “would”, “should” - Less Wrong
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First, I think you're doing good, valuable stuff. In particular, the skeptism regarding naive realism.
However, your "puzzle piece 1" paragraph seems like it needs shoring up. Your puzzle piece 1 gives claims, at first, that CSAs are "common", and then strengthens that to "ubiquity" in the last sentence. The concrete examples of CSAs given are "humans, some animals, and some human-created programs." Couldn't the known tendency for humans to confabulate explanations of their own reasoning processes explain both humans and human-created programs?
My suspicion is that chess has cast a long shadow over the history of artificial intelligence. Humans, confronted with the chess problem, naturally learn a CSA-like strategy of exploring the game tree, and can explain their strategy verbally. Humans who are skilled at chess are celebrated as skilled thinkers. Turing wrote about the possibility of a chess-playing machine in the context of artificial intelligence a long time ago. The game tree really does have Real Options and Real Choices. The counterfactuals involved in considering it do not seem philosophically problematic - there's a bright line (the magic circle) to cross.
That being said, I agree that we need to start somewhere, and we can come back to this point later, to investigate agents which have other moderately plausible internal structures.
When playing chess, there is a strategy for cashing out counterfactuals of the form "If I make this move", which involves considering the rules of chess, and the assumption that your opponent will make the best available move. The problem is to come up with a general method of cashing out counterfactuals that works in more general situations than playing chess. It does not work to just compute logical consequences because any conclusion can be derived from a contradiction. So a concept of counterfactuals should specify what other facts must be modified or ignored to avoid deriving a contradiction. The strategy used for chess achieves this by specifying the facts that you may consider.
I agree completely with your conclusion. However, your claim "any conclusion can be derived from a contradiction" is provocative. It is only true in classical logic - relevant logic does not have that problem.