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I don't really understand this part.
"The scanner does not understand the information but the person does" sounds like some variant of Searle's Chinese Room argument when presented without further qualifiers. People in AI tend to regard Searle as a confused distraction.
The intelligent agent model still deals with deterministic machines that take input and produce output, but it incorporates the possibility of changing the agent's internal state by presenting the output function as just taking the entire input history X* as an input to the function that produces the latest output Y, so that a different history of inputs can lead to a different output on the latest input, just like it can with humans and more sophisticated machines.
I suppose the idea here is that there is some difference whether there is a human being sitting in the scanner, or, say, a toy robot with a state of two bits where one is I am thinking about cats and the other is I am broken and will lie about thinking about cats. With the robot, we could just check the "broken" bit as well from the scan when the robot is disagreeing with the scanner, and if it is set, conclude that the robot is broken.
I'm not seeing how humans must be fundamentally different. The scanner can already do the extremely difficult task of mapping a raw brain state to the act of thinking about a cat, it should also be able to tell from the brain state whether the person has something going on in their brain that will make them deny thinking about a cat. Things being deterministic and predictable from knowing their initial state doesn't mean they can't have complex behavior reacting to a long history of sensory inputs accompanied by a large amount of internal processing that might correspond quite well to what we think of as reflection or understanding.
Sorry I keep skipping over your formalism stuff, but I'm still not really grasping the underlying assumptions behind this approach. (The underlying approach in the computer science approach are, roughly, "the physical world exists, and is made of lots of interacting, simple, Turing-computable stuff and nothing else", "animals and humans are just clever robots made of the stuff", "magical souls aren't involved, not even if they wear a paper bag that says 'conscious experience' on their head")
The whole philosophical theory of everything thing does remind me of this strange thing from a year ago, where the building blocks for the theory were made out of nowadays more fashionable category theory rather than set theory though.
I've read some of this Universal Induction article. It seems to operate from flawed premises.
Suppose the brain... (read more)