Omega lies

Stuart_Armstrong

Just developing my second idea at the end of my last post. It seems to me that in the Newcomb problem and in the counterfactual mugging, the completely trustworthy Omega lies to a greater or lesser extent.

This is immediately obvious in scenarios where Omega simulates you in order to predict your reaction. In the Newcomb problem, the simulated you is told "I have already made my decision...", which is not true at that point, and in the counterfactual mugging, whenever the coin comes up heads, the simulated you is told "the coin came up tails". And the arguments only go through because these lies are accepted by the simulated you as being true.

If Omega doesn't simulate you, but uses other methods to gauge your reactions, he isn't lying to you per se. But he is estimating your reaction in the hypothetical situation where you were fed untrue information that you believed to be true. And that you believed to be true, specifically because the source is Omega, and Omega is trustworthy.

Doesn't really change much to the arguments here, but it's a thought worth bearing in mind.

Interesting point!

However, I can think of a couple of ways of sidestepping it to have a Newcomb problem without lies:

Omega may be able to predict your reaction without simulating you at all, just like a human may be able to perfectly predict the behavior of a program without executing it
Omega could tell you "Either I am simulating you to gauge your response, or this is reality and I predicted your response" - and the problem would be essentially the same.

So it mostly seems to boil down to the implementation details of Omega.

Omega may be able to predict your reaction without simulating you at all, just like a human may be able to perfectly predict the behavior of a program without executing it

If you perfectly predict something (as Omega supposedly does), you must run a model on some hardware equivalent.

Unless you subscribe to special pleading similar to "if a program does not run on silicon based hardware, it's not truly run" - as Searle does with the special role attributed to the brain - you should expect that model that predicts your reaction to be essentially... (read more)

6EricHerboso14y

This is essentially the same only if you care only about reality. But if you care about outcomes in simulations, too, then this is not "essentially the same" as the regular formulation of the problem. If I care about my outcomes when I am "just a simulation" in a similar way to when I am "in reality", then the phrasing you've used for Omega would not lead to the standard Newcomb problem. If I'm understanding this correctly, your reformulation of what Omega says will result in justified two-boxing with CDT. Either I'm a simulation, or I'm not. Since I might possibly choose to one-box or two-box as a probability distribution (e.g.: 70% of the time one-box; otherwise two-box), Omega must simulate me several times. This means I'm much more likely to be a simulation. Since we're in a simulation, Omega has not yet predicted our response. Therefore two-boxing really is genuinely better than one-boxing. In other words, while Newcomb's problem is usually an illustration for why CDT fails by saying we should two-box, under your reformulation, CDT correctly says we should two-box. (Under the assumption that we value simulated utilons as we do "real" ones.)

3Stuart_Armstrong14y

In that case, even a causal decision theorist (who cared about their copies) would get the right answer.

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