Toward a Kantian refutation of Agent Foundations
This post is a Cunningham's law draft, less than 50% finished, in some parts mere notes. Consider a) waiting until this notice has disappeared to read a more coherent post, or b) criticizing it with a focus on what would be right, not just what is wrong. I haven't strongly made my mind yet, so at this stage I'm particularly interested in fundamental criticisms of the goal and framing (but of course I also welcome minor corrections).TL;DR: The goals of Agent Foundations seem so far-fetched that all the progress made in the field doesn't seem to have decreased our distance to them that much. One might conclude that the goal is unachievable, the question ill-posed. But even the available rejections of AF seems unprincipled: instead of proving that the task is impossible,[1] we simply fail, and do something else instead. Working toward a principled refutation of Agent Foundations might either indeed refute AF or point to unexplored directions, and both outcomes would be helpful information.Prelude: Kant's refutation of all arguments of God's existenceKant argued that there are three (and only three) related concepts of God, definable on three different levels: Defined independently of any universe: God as set of all logical predicates.Defined in connection to the existence of a universe, without assuming any of its properties: God as cause of the universe.Defined in connection to our universe: God as cause of the apparent purposefulness of the universe.He argued furthermore that none of three definitions have enough "meat" to allow for a valid proof of its existence, and concluded that everyone should stop wasting their time trying to prove God's existence.I'm not interested in the specifics of Kant's argument; only in the structure:1. We are dealing with concepts that are to some extent[2] definable without reference to the specific facts of our universe2. There are different levels of "abstraction from the facts of our universe" in which different definitions can be m