Mitchell_Porter comments on Ingredients of Timeless Decision Theory - Less Wrong

43 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 19 August 2009 01:10AM

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Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 21 August 2009 12:16:38PM 1 point [-]

I'm not keeping up here - I only peek at this site occasionallly, rather than following it - but this:

"The one-sentence version is: Choose as though controlling the logical output of the abstract computation you implement, including the output of all other instantiations and simulations of that computation."

... seems rather similar to the dictum that you should choose as if you really might be any of your subjective duplicates, from across all possible worlds. (I suppose there is a difference, in that "subjective duplicate" refers only to the properties of yourself that you can perceive, whereas "the abstract computation you implement" refers to a property that is not explicitly available to you.)

And to me that dictum sounds standardly Bayesian - with the set of all entities in all possible worlds providing the prior, and the subjectively available data (about what sort of entity you are) providing the evidence on which you condition. So it's intriguing to see the claim that starting out in this way leads to making the right choices in a number of situations where standard decision theory gets it wrong.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 August 2009 09:07:48PM 1 point [-]

Omega may not contain a copy of you which is detailed enough to be a subjective duplicate. Omega may just be reasoning abstractly about you. So you legitimately know that you are not inside Omega - but you also expect that whatever you decide, Omega will have successfully predicted.