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GuySrinivasan comments on The Blue-Minimizing Robot - Less Wrong
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First of all, your control theory work was...not exactly what started me thinking along these lines, but what made it click when I realized the lines I had been thinking along were similar to the ones I had read about in one of your introductory posts about performing complex behaviors without representations. So thank you.
Second - When you say the robot has a "different goal", I'm not sure what you mean. What is the robot's goal? To follow the program detailed in the first paragraph?
Let's say Robot-1 genuinely has the goal to kill terrorists. If a hacker were to try to change its programming to "make automobiles" instead, Robot-1 would do anything it could to thwart the hacker; its goal is to kill terrorists, and letting a hacker change its goal would mean more terrorists get left alive. This sort of stability, in which the preference remains a preference regardless of context are characteristic of my definition of "goal".
This "blue-minimizing robot" won't display that kind of behavior. It doesn't thwart the person who places a color inversion lens on it (even though that thwarts its stated goal of "minimizing blue"), and it wouldn't try to take the color inversion lens off even if it had a manipulator arm. Even if you claim its goal is just to "follow its program", it wouldn't use its laser to stop someone walking up to it and changing its program, which means its program no longer got followed.
This isn't just a reduction of a goal to a program: predicting the robot's goal-based behavior and its program-based behavior give different results.
If goals reduce to a program like the robot's in any way, it's in the way that Einsteinian mechanics "reduce" to Newtonian mechanics - giving good results in most cases but being fundamentally different and making different predictions on border cases. Because there are other programs that goals do reduce to, like the previously mentioned Robot-1, I don't think it's appropriate to call what the blue-minimizer is doing a "goal".
If you still disagree, can you say exactly what goal you think the robot is pursuing, so I can examine your argument in more detail?
I recall that a big problem we had before was trying to unpack what different people meant by the words "goal", "model", etc. But your description of at least this distinction you're drawing between the things which you're calling "goals" and the things which you're calling "programs" is very good, IMO!