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RobinHanson comments on What Program Are You? - Less Wrong
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Comments (42)
Robin, until we solve this problem (and I do agree that you've identified a problem that needs to be solved), is there anything wrong with taking the decomposition of an agent into program and data as an external input to the decision theory, much like how priors and utility functions are external inputs to evidential decision theory, and causal relationships are an additional input to causal decision theory?
It seems that in most decision problems there are intuitively obvious decompositions, even if we can't yet formalize the criteria that we use to to do this, so this doesn't seem to pose a practical problem as far as using TDT/UDT to make everyday decisions. Do you have an example where the decomposition is not intuitively obvious?
The decomposition rarely seems intuitively obvious to me. For example, what part of me is program vs. data? And are there any constraints on acceptable decompositions? Is it really all right to act as if you were controlling the actions of all physical objects, for example?
I wonder if it would help to try to bracket the uncertain area with less ambiguous cases, and maybe lead to a better articulation of the implicit criteria by which people distinguish program and data.
On one side, I propose that if the behavior you're talking about would also be exhibited by a crash dummy substituted for your body, then it's data and not program. For example, if someone pushes me off a cliff, it's not my suicidal "program" that accelerates me downwards @ 32ft / s^2, but the underlying "data."
On the other, if you write down a plan beforehand and actually locomote (e.g. on muscle power) to enact the plan, then it is program.
Are these reasonable outer bounds to our uncertainty? If not, why? If so, can we narrow them further?