Um?
OK, I would say that your first belief implies that what appears to be a decision in this case is in fact not a decision, but rather a working out of the inevitable consequences of an earlier state. The only reason it seems like a decision is because I'm ignorant of the real possibilities.
The situation, on this account, is analogous to my "deciding" not to fly away when dropped off the top of a building. I can imagine being in a delusional state where it does not seem inevitable to me that I will fall to the ground, and I can further imagine being in a state where I believe I have decided to fall, but In both cases I would simply be wrong.
Similarly, on this account, my belief that I choose whether to save a murderer or not is simply wrong. There's no actual decision to be made; that there seems to be a decision is simply a delusion shared by approximately everyone.
It's like having an electrical switch connected to both a buzzer and a lightbulb, with a 3-second delay between the switch being flipped and the lightbulb going on. Clearly any intuition that the buzzer caused the light to turn on is just post hoc ergo prompter hoc run amok, but to start talking about the lightbulb having an acausal consequence of the buzzer going off seems downright unjustified.
It is not clear to me why that situation changes if the buzzer is a murder and the lightbulb is me saving the murderer, or if the buzzer is Omega putting money into boxes and the lightbulb is me opening the box. Sure, the underlying mechanisms are way more complex, but I don't see how any of that complexity affects any of what we're talking about, if we start from the assumption that free will is an illusion.
(shrug) Maybe the whole point here is to resurrect some notion of free will worth considering, or something... I dunno. I am still working my way fairly linearly through the old OB posts, and have not actually read any of the more recent TDT stuff, so probably I shouldn't be trying to engage in these conversations just yet.
But, well, sometimes I do things I shouldn't.
I would say that your first belief implies that what appears to be a decision in this case is in fact not a decision, but rather a working out of the inevitable consequences of an earlier state.
Do you ever make a decision that is not like this?
I think that the official Less Wrong answer to the problem of free will is that you do make a decision, since it is the consequence of your state, but this is just as a computer may make a decision, say to allocate certain CPU cycles to certain processes (which is the sort of decision that modern operating system ...
- This thread has run its course. You will find newer threads in the discussion section.
Another discussion thread - the fourth - has reached the (arbitrary?) 500 comments threshold, so it's time for a new thread for Eliezer Yudkowsky's widely-praised Harry Potter fanfic.
Most of the paratext and fan-made resources are listed on Mr. LessWrong's author page. There is also AdeleneDawner's collection of most of the previously-published Author's Notes.
Older threads: one, two, three, four. By tag.
Newer threads are in the Discussion section, starting from Part 6.
Spoiler policy as suggested by Unnamed and approved by Eliezer, me, and at least three other upmodders:
It would also be quite sensible and welcome to continue the practice of declaring at the top of your post which chapters you are about to discuss, especially for newly-published ones, so that people who haven't yet seen them can stop reading in time.