 Another strategy for dealing with certain dynamic choice problems—this one proposed by Robert Nozick (1993)—is the strategy of investing actions with symbolic utility (or value) and then allowing oneself to be influenced not only by the causal significance of one’s actions, but also by their symbolic significance. According to Nozick, “actions and outcomes can symbolize still further events … [and] draw upon themselves the emotional meaning (and utility…) of these other events” (26). If “we impute to actions… utilities coordinate with what they symbolize, and we strive to realize (or avoid) them as we would strive for what they stand for” (32), our choices will differ from what they would be if we considered only the causal significance of our actions. Consider, for example, the case of the self-torturer. Suppose the self-torturer has moved up ten settings in ten weeks. He is still in a very comfortable range, but he is starting to worry about ending up at a high setting that would leave him in excruciating pain. It occurs to him that he should quit while he is ahead, and he begins to symbolically associate moving up a setting at the next opportunity with moving up a setting at every upcoming opportunity. By the time the next opportunity to move up a setting comes around, the extremely negative symbolic significance of this potential action steers him away from performing the action. For a structurally similar but more down-to-earth example, consider someone who loves overeating but is averse to becoming overweight. If this individual comes to symbolically associate having an extra helping with overeating in general and thus with becoming overweight, he may be averse to having the extra helping, even if, in causal terms, what he does in this particular case is negligible.