It seems like real life is most analogous to the FDT formulation for the Murder Lesion; all decision theories are imperfectly implemented in a variety of meat or silicon with some hardwired lesion-like behavior that reduces the power of the theory. Recognizing/discovering the actual hardwired behavior sounds like a useful ability for an agent to have. Solving the identity/embedding problem would do it, but are there other ways a decision theory could hedge against unknown hardwired behavior?