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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Bridge Collapse: Reductionism as Engineering Problem - Less Wrong
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Thanks, Adele!
That's right, if you mean 'representations exist, so they must be implemented in physical systems'.
But the Cartesian agrees with 'the map is part of the territory' on a different interpretation. She thinks the mental and physical worlds both exist (as distinct 'countries' in a larger territory). Her error is just to think that it's impossible to redescribe the mental parts of the universe in physical terms.
An attempt at a Cartesian seed AI would probably just break, unless it overcame its Cartesianness by some mostly autonomous evolutionary algorithm for generating successful successor-agents. A human programmer could try to improve it over time, but it wouldn't be able to rely much on the AI's own intelligence (because self-modification is precisely where the AI has no defined hypotheses), so I'd expect the process to become increasingly difficult and slow and ineffective as we reached the limits of human understanding.
I think the main worry with Cartesians isn't that they're dumb-ish, so they might become a dangerously unpredictable human-level AI or a bumbling superintelligence. The main worry is that they're so dumb that they'll never coalesce into a working general intelligence of any kind. Then, while the build-a-clean-AI people (who are trying to design simple, transparent AGIs with stable, defined goals) are busy wasting their time in the blind alley of Cartesian architectures, some random build-an-ugly-AI project will pop up out of left field and eat us.
Build-an-ugly-AI people care about sloppy, quick-and-dirty search processes, not so much about AIXI or Solomonoff. So the primary danger of Cartesians isn't that they're Unfriendly; it's that they're shiny objects distracting a lot of the people with the right tastes and competencies for making progress toward Friendliness.
The bootstrapping idea is probably a good one: There's no way we'll succeed at building a perfect FAI in one go, so the trick will be to cut corners in all the ways that can get fixed by the system, and that don't make the system unsafe in the interim. I'm not sure Cartesianism is the right sort of corner to cut. Yes, the AI won't care about self-preservation; but it also won't care about any other interim values we'd like to program it with, except ones that amount to patterns of sensory experience for the AI.
The "build a clean Cartesian AI" folks, Schmidhuber and Hutter, are much closer to "describe how to build a clean naturalistic AI given unlimited computing power" than, say, Lenat's Eurisko is to AIXI. It's just that AIXI won't actually work as a conceptual foundation for the reasons given, nay it is Solomonoff induction itself which will not work as a conceptual foundation, hence considering naturalized induction as part of the work to be done along the way to OPFAI. The worry from Eurisko-style AI is not that it will be Cartesian and therefore bad, but that it will do self-modification in a completely ad-hoc way and thus have no stable specifiable properties nor be apt to grafting on such. To avoid that, we want to do a cleaner system; and then, doing a cleaner system, we wish it to be naturalistic rather than Cartesian for the given reasons. Also, once you sketch out how a naturalistic system works, it's very clear that these are issues central to stable self-modification - the system's model of how it works and its attempt to change it.
I think you are conflating two different problems:
How to learn by reinforcement in an unknown non-ergodic environment (e.g. one where it is possible to drop an anvil on your head)
How to make decisions that take into account future reward, in a non-ergodic environment, where actions may modify the agent.
The first problem is well known the reinforcement learning community, and in fact it is mentioned also in the first AIXI papers, but it is sidestepped with an ergodicity assumption, rather than addressed.
I don't think there can be really general solutions for this problem: you need some environment-specific prior or supervision.
The second problem doesn't seem as hard as the first one.
AIXI, of course, can't model self-modifications, because it is incomputable and it can only deal with computable environments, but computable varieties of AIXI (Schmidhuber's Gödel machine, perhaps?) can easily represent themselves as part of the environment.