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Alejandro1 comments on Open thread, Feb. 16 - Feb. 22, 2015 - Less Wrong
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I've had an experience a couple of times that feels like being stuck in a loop of circular preferences.
It goes like this. Say I have set myself the goal of doing some work before lunch. Noon arrives, and I haven't done any work--let's say I'm reading blogs instead. I start feeling hungry. I have an impulse to close the blogs and go get some lunch. Then I think I don't want to "concede defeat" and I better do at least some work before lunch, to feel better about myself. I open briefly my work, and then… close it and reopen the blogs. The cycle restarts. So Lunch > Blogs, Work > Lunch, and Blogs > Work.
(It usually ends with me doing some trivial amount of work--writing a few lines for a paper, sending an email, etc--and then going for lunch with an only half-guilty conscience.)
Has anybody else experienced circular-like preferences, whether procrastination-related like these or in a different context?
It's multiple agents with their own preferences fighting for the mic. One agent with a loop is not a good model here, imo.
I disagree; I think that rather than multiple agents, one should self-model as zero agents.
Rather than the expected link of the blue-minimizing robot, I will instead link you somewhere else.
You are addressing the clothes and telling them they have no emperor. They can't hear you.
But Dennett is sort of besides the point here. I can build a simple agent ecosystem in LISP, and nobody would suggest there is anything conscious there. "Agent" talk as applied to such a LISP program would just be a useful modeling technique. An "agent" could just be "something with a utility function that can act," not "conscious self."
In fact, in the kinds of dilemmas humans face that the OP discusses, often some of the "agents" in question are something very old and pre-verbal and (regardless of your stance on consciousness) not very conscious at all. This does not prevent them from leaving a large footprint on our mental landscape.
The part that causes circularity is probably the work: it feels easy when you are not doing it (in far mode), but difficult when you are about to do it (in near mode). You preferences are probably something like this:
The Abstract Idea of Work > Lunch > Blogs > The Real Work
Of course, it could also be the opposite way around, as many people have more anxiety about things than they end up feeling when they do the things.