Let me see if I understand this. An agent cannot tell for sure whether she is real or a simulation. But she is about to find out. Because she now faces a decision which has different consequences if she is real. She must choose action C or D.
She believes that there is a 50% chance she is a sim. She knows that the only reason the sim was created was to coerce the real agent into playing C. So what should she do?
Your answer seems to be that she should systematically discount all simulated utilities. For example, she should do the math as if:
That is, what happens in the simulation just isn't as important as what happens in real life. The agent should maximize the sum (real utility + 0.001 * simulated utility).
Note: the 50% probability and the 0.001 discounting factor were just pulled out of the air in this example.
If this is what you are saying, then it is interesting that your suggestion (reality is more important than a sim) has some formal similarities to time discounting (now is more important than later) and also to Nash bargaining (powerful is more important than powerless).
Cool!
That actually might be a cooler thing than I said, but I appreciate your generous misinterpretation! I had to google for the nash bargaining game and I still don't entirely understand your analogy there. If you could expand on that bit, I'd be interested :-)
What I was trying to say was simply that there is a difference between something like "solipsistic benefits" and "accomplishment benefits". Solipsistic benefits are unaffected by transposition into a perfect simulation despite the fact that someone in the substrate can change the ...
http://www.sl4.org/archive/0708/16600.html