the only reason Alice's intentions matter is their ability to predict her future behavior. if we assume for the sake of argument her behavior will always be identical to bob's then not only does it not matter what her internal motivations are it's arguable that her internal motivations don't actually differ from bob's. Thinking is, after all, an action, and all of their actions are identical. Therefore it seems like your example assumes Alice's behavior both is and isn't identical to Bob's.
> Thinking is, after all, an action, and all of their actions are identical. Therefore it seems like your example assumes Alice's behavior both is and isn't identical to Bob's.
By your logic, I was heterosexual for my entire young adult life when I actively worked to deceive people from realizing my actual orientation :P
People employ dishonesty for lots of reasons, and in myriad ways. Sure, in this thought experiment, perfect indistinguishability means the difference is inconsequential. But you can use crises as an oracle to observe different behaviors, and thus undermine its indistinguishability.
To keep the cryptography going, this is like an active vs passive attack. Sure, it's IND-KPA, but is it IND-CPA or IND-CCA? Perhaps not!
>actions are identical
>actively worked to deceive
that's the contradiction i'm talking about. deception requires effort and planning, it's not just casually doing something. I think that as I explore this I might fundamentally be arguing that saying the same words when you believe them true vs when you believe them false are measurably different, and that the only way for someone to say something falsely in exactly the same way they do truthfully is for them to believe that they're true. You said yourself, you actively tried to deceive people.
As far as using crises to undermine indistinguishability, that was another part of my point: if actions are indistinguishable between two actors we only care about the actors' motivation as an attempt to guess how likely they are to remain indistinguishable. If a crisis causes the two actors to distinguish themselves then, once again, we've undermined the original premise of the experiment.
If their intentions are really different their thinking is probably different.
then it follows that if their thinking is the same then their intentions are the same. given that thinking is an action, and the description says their actions are the same, then their thinking must be the same and therefore their intentions the same. it's meaningless to think of someone who only does what's right but only does it for wrong reasons as someone can only arrive at right actions through right thought, to allude to buddhism. if alice's motivations are truly different then her actions must diverge from bob's at some point (or we just assume that alice's actions and motivations have no relationship which, again, renders the question meaningless).