Obeying the laws of physics is not a normative consideration, you are not optimizing your actions with a goal of not breaking out of Nature. According to the laws of physics, you always act according to the laws of physics, however you actually decide (according to the laws of physics).
Yes, that all sounds right. That's why I was puzzled - I can't see where the tension is between that and what I'm saying.
To clarify: When I refer to "Given that this is my initial state, I ultimately do that" as a mathematical statement, the statement I'm referring to is really: "Given that this is my initial state, and given that these are the laws of physics, I will ultimately do that." I never had in mind any idea of "trying not to break out of Nature".
The idea of TDT-God arose as the answer to the question "for whom is it trivially true that TDT makes the correct decisions". (Just as it's absolutely, utterly trivial from the definitions that CDT is correct for Sam Beckett and EDT is correct for the spectator.)
(Just as it's absolutely, utterly trivial from the definitions that CDT is correct for Sam Beckett and EDT is correct for the spectator.)
CDT is not correct in game-theoretic situations where other agents can know things about you, with the effect of its incorrectness gradual. See Ch. 7 of TDT paper:
Modeling agents as influenced to some greater or lesser degree by "the sort of decision you make, being the person that you are", realistically describes present-day human existence.
The error could be tiny, but it could even be present where no ...
I couldn't find any concise explanation of what the decision theories are. Here's mine:
A Causal Decision Theorist wins, given what's happened so far.
An Evidential Decision Theorist wins, given what they know.
A Timeless Decision Theorist wins a priori.
To explain what I mean, here are two interesting problems. In each of them, two of the decision theories give one choice, and the third gives the other.
In Newcomb's problem and you separate people into groups based on what happened before the experiment, i.e. whether or not Box A has money, CDT will be at least as successful in each group as any other strategy, and notably more successful than EDT and TDT. If you separate it into what's known, there's only one group, since everybody has the same information. EDT is at least as successful as any other strategy, and notably more successful than CDT. If you don't separate it at all, TDT will be at least as successful as any other strategy, and notably more successful than EDT.
In Parfit's hitchhiker, when it comes time to pay the driver, if you split into groups based on what happened before the experiment, i.e. whether or not one has been picked up, CDT will be at least as successful in each group as any other strategy, and notably more successful than TDT. If you split based on what's given, which is again whether or not one has been picked up, EDT will be at least as successful in each group as any other strategy, and notably more successful than TDT. If you don't separate at all, TDT will be at least as successful as any other strategy, and notably more successful than CDT and EDT.
There's one thing I'm not sure about. How does Updateless Decision Theory compare?