I can write down TDT agents who have preferences about abstract worlds, e.g. in which the agent is instantiated on an ideal Turing machine and utility is just defined in terms of mathematical properties of the output (say, whether it is a proof of the Goldbach conjecture) and the running time.
Is the objection before or after this point?
I can write down TDT agents who care about the number of 1s in universally distributed sequences agreeing with their observations so far (as I remarked above). Do you think this agent definition implodes, or that the resulting agents just don't act as self-interested as they look like they would? (Particularly I'm talking about the ones who actually are in simple universes, so who can quickly rule out concerns about simulators, and who don't rely on others' generosity).
(I'm trying to repeat things in many different ways so as to increase the chance that I'm understood; apologies if the repetition is needless.)
Is the objection before or after this point?
Before, but again my objection is sort of orthogonal to the way you've set up the scenario. When you say you can write down TDT "agents" I don't believe you. I believe you can write down specifications of syntax-manipulating algorithms that will solve tic tac toe or other narrow problems just fine, and I of course believe that it's physically possible to call...
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