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Kingreaper comments on Unpacking the Concept of "Blackmail" - Less Wrong
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When reasoning about counterfactuals a good principle is never to reach to a more distant* world than necessary.
*(less similar)
If you were to simulate the universe as it was before they contacted you, and make 1 single alteration (tapping their brain so they decide not to contact you) would the simulation's moon be made of green cheese?
That universe is pretty much the closest possible universe to ours where they don't contact you.
Why are merely similar worlds ought to be relevant at all? There could be ways of approximate reasoning about complicated definition of the actual world you care about, but actually normatively caring about the worlds that you know not to be actual (i.e. the one you actually care about) is a contradiction of terms.
You asked how to reason about counterfactuals.
I answered.
I'm not sure what you're asking now. Could you please clarify?
The reason I think about counterfactuals is to understand cause and effect. If you change something, then anything to which it is a cause must also change.
But things (such as whether the moon is made of green cheese) which AREN'T caused by the something, would not change
You answered informally. It's easy, and not what I wondered about.
Things don't change. When you make a decision, you are not changing the future, you are deciding the future. The future is what it is given your actual decision, all else is fantasy (logically inconsistent even, because the structure of your own mind implies only one decision, when you ignore some unimportant cognitive noise), perhaps morally important fantasy whose structure we ought to understand, but still not the reality.
What did you wonder about? You seemed to be wondering why you shouldn't just go "Well, if they'd done that, the moon would have been made of cheese".
If you can't think about counterfactuals such as "What will happen if I do X?" "What will happen if I do Y?" etc., you can't make rational decisions.
You may wish to dismiss counterfactuals as fantasy, but does doing so help you come to good decisions? Or does it hinder you?
The goal is not to dismiss counterfactuals, but to understand where they come from, and how are they relevant for reasoning about the actual world. Distinguish inability to reason informally from lack of formal understanding of the structure of that informal reasoning.
They are a mode of thought. They come from the thinker.
They allow you to look at cause and effect. Without counterfactuals, you can't reason about cause and effect, you can only reason about correlation.
Taboo cause, effect, taboo counterfactuals. That something is, doesn't answer why it's normatively useful ("they come from the thinker").
Okay: Thinking about how things would differ now, or in future, based on a slightly modified version of the past, allows us to accurately consider what the world could be like, in the future, based on our options in the present.
You said you sought to understand where they came from. That they come from the thinker is an answer to that. I answered how they're relevant in the second part of the post (and the first part of this one)
You ignore these points and repeat something contradictory to them, which is wrong in a debate even if you don't accept them. You (or I) need to find another path, and not rehash the same ground.
I am not sure that I am correct. But there seems to be another possibility.
If we assume that the world is a model of some formal theory, then counterfactuals are models of different formal theories, whose models have finite isomorphic subsets (reality accessible to the agent before it makes a decision).
Thus counterfactuals aren't inconsistent as they use different formal theories, and they are important because agent cannot decide the one that applies to the world before it makes a decision.