Comment on Timelessness as a Conservative Extension of Causal Decision Theory

Tue, 03 Jun 2014 14:09:57 GMT

Ok, I've been talking it over with Benjamin Fox some more, and I don't think Omega's trustworthiness is the issue here. The issue is basically to come up with some decision-theoretic notion of "virtue": "I should take action X because, timelessly speaking, a history in which I always respond to choice Y with action X nets me more money/utility/happiness than any other." The idea is that taking action X or not doing so in any one particular instance can change which history we're enacting, while normal decision theories reason only over the scope of a single choice-instance, with little regard for potential futures about which we don't have specific information encoded in our causal graph.

Discuss