Quote:
Originally Posted by Aaron W.
Does this imply that you need actual options in order to have a choice?
Not "actual options" in the sense of "possible options."
If you're asking whether more than one action is necessary, I'm not sure. I can't think of a meaningful situation in which choice applies to only a single action. But is such a situation
necessarily incompatible with my conception of choice?
I'm not sure. If we were to remove the -2 part of the program, but leave the -1 part, and call it a "choice," well... that feels awfully "weird" to me. But if we leave both the -2 part and the -1 part, it's comfortable for me to say the program is choosing.
And I defined choice as an evaluation of modeled actions, the plural "actions" seems to suggest that more than one action is being modeled and evaluated.
So while this is conceptually a gray area, I think defining choice on the basis of multiple actions is best for this discussion. I doubt that anyone will come up with a counterexample in which there is only one action, and I am still tempted to call the process "choice."