Cyan2 comments on Timeless Control - Less Wrong

19 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 07 June 2008 05:16AM

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Comment author: Cyan2 09 June 2008 02:28:42AM 0 points [-]

HA, Dennett's a compatibilist, so his analogy is meant to demonstrate that making a choice is not an illusory experience. That's the part I was talking about when I said we can meaningfully discuss the choices it makes.

For example, we can analyze the game and say, "The algorithm blundered in this move -- it ignored a line of play which leads to a significant disadvantage," or perhaps, "This move was excellent -- the algorithm decided to sacrifice material for much greater activity for its developed pieces, allowing it to dominate the board; it will probably be able to force a win." The fact that we can get into the guts of the code and point to the heuristics and evaluating functions that led to these plays does not invalidate the fact that the algorithm really did make choices. For conscious beings, the content of the experience of making a choice is in the evaluating and the acting, not in the exercise of some kind of "free will" that requires the essence of choice to exist outside a deterministic physics.

Given this framework, I'm not really seeing any danger in calling choices non-illusory.