No, you're right, that's in there. I'm not familiar with the source material, I suppose.

Her control as a newborn is her luminosity, so far as I can determine - she has a set of generalized techniques to influence her desires and emotions, and takes advantage of the specific knowledge which she acquired from the others in her coven to focus these techniques on the precise alterations she needs to be a well-controlled newborn.

And being thought of by someone is evidence of the thing being true. And all these evidences are screened off by correct analysis of the thought itself.

I spoke correctly - I didn't express agreement on the broader issue because I don't want to update too hastily. I'm still thinking.

(And if it matters, a lot of people report not wanting children, but then wanting to care for their children upon involuntary parenthood.)

That's a test that favors the SAMEL explanation, I think.

As Perplexed said, there is no requirement that the utility function change - and, in fact, no reason to believe that it does not already have positive terms for children before reproduction. A lot of people report wanting children.

I'm asking these questions because we clearly have not established agreement, and I want to determine why. I assume that either we are using conflicting data, applying incompatible rules of inference, or simply misreading each other's writing. It was this last possibility I was probing with that last question.

Why does the cognitive system that identifies SAMELs fire when you have a child? The situation is not visibly similar to that of Parfit's hitchhiker. Unless you are suggesting that parenthood simply activates the same precommitment mechanism that the decision theory uses when Parfit-hitchhiking...?

This may not be my true objection (I think it is abundantly clear at this point that I am not adept at identifying my true objections), but I just don't understand your objection to 2a. As far as I can tell, it boils down to "never assume that an agent has terms in its utility functions for other agents", but I'm not assuming - there is an evolutionary advantage to having a term in your utility function for your children. By the optimization criteria of evolution, the only reason not to support a child is if you are convinced that the child is either not related or an evolutionary dead-end (at which point it becomes "no child of mine" or some such). In contrast, the Parfit-hitchhiker mechanism involves upholding contracts, none of which your child offered, and therefore seems an entirely unrelated mechanism at the level of the individual organism.

(Regarding my hypothetical, I was merely trying to demonstrate that I understood the nature of the hypothetical - it has no further significance.)

Taking your objections out of order:

First: yes, I have the scenario wrong - correct would be to switch Ag and Om, and have:

1. Om examines Ag and comes to the conclusion that Ag will cooperate.
2. Om offers to watch Ag's children while Ag hunts, in exchange for a portion of the proceeds.
3. Ag agrees.
4. Om watches Ag's children while Ag hunts.
5. Ag returns successful, and gives Om a share of the bounty.

In this case, Om has already given Ag utility - the ability to hunt - on the expectation that Ag will give up utility - meat - at a later time. I will edit in a note indicating the erroneous formulation in the original comment.

Second: what we are comparing are cases where an agent gives no utility to cooperating with Omega, but uses a decision theory that does so because it boosts the agent's utility (e.g. the prototypical case) and cases where the agent gives positive utility to cooperating with Omega (e.g. if the agent and Omega were the same person and the net change is sufficiently positive). What we need to do to determine if the isomorphism with Parfit's hitchhiker is sufficient is to identify a case where the agent's actions will differ.

It seems to me that the latter case, the agent will give utility to Omega even if Omega never gives utility to the agent. Parfit's hitchhikers do not give money to Nomega, the predictor agent who wasn't at the scene and never gave them a ride - they only give money when the SAMEL is present. Therefore: if a parent is willing to make sacrifices when their parent didn't, the Parfit parallel is poor and Theory 2a is the better fit. Agreed?

By "most important reason" do you mean "most compelling justification" or "predominant cause"?