cousin_it comments on What is Wei Dai's Updateless Decision Theory? - Less Wrong

37 Post author: AlephNeil 19 May 2010 10:16AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (63)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: cousin_it 26 May 2010 12:37:53PM *  0 points [-]

"What is the you" is part of the question. Consider it in terms of counterfactuals. Agent A is told via quining that it has source code S. We're interested in how to implement A so that it outputs "yes" if S is really its source code, but would output "no" if S were changed to S' while leaving the rest of the agent unchanged.

In this formulation the problem seems to be impossible to solve, unless the agent has access to an external "reader oracle" that can just read its source code back to it. Guess that answers my original question, then.