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HonoreDB comments on You're in Newcomb's Box - LessWrong
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No, they aren't. They are answering the question according to the standard meaning conveyed with "Why?". When we use the word 'why' we mean a variety of things along the lines of 'What purpose does this serve?' as well as sometimes 'Explain the series of events that lead up to the final state in a convenient way'.
In standard usage if someone answers 'so you don't cut yourself' they usually are not talking about anything to do with temporal relations one way or the other.
What I'm arguing is that talk of purpose or design implicitly involves temporal concepts. The purpose of a knife is not ontologically basic; when you point at a purpose you're pointing at a chain of causality involving an optimization process and predictions of future uses of the knife.