>From Wei Dai, Thu, 15 Feb 2001 05:00:23:
<<<
Sentient beings can follow the same decision procedure used by the oracle.
Suppose you are faced with a bet involving a tossed coin. There is no need
to consider probabilistic questions like "what is the probability that the
coin landed heads?" which would involve anthropic reasoning. You know that
there are worlds where it landed heads and worlds where it landed tails,
and that there are instances of you in all of these worlds which are
indistinguishable from each other from the first-person perspective. You
can make the decision by considering the consequences of each choice if
all instances of you were to make that choice.
<<<
This reminds me of excellent recent work by Marcus Hutter:
"Towards a universal theory of AI based on algorithmic
probability and sequential decision theory"
ftp://ftp.idsia.ch/pub/techrep/IDSIA-14-00.ps.gz
JS
Received on Fri Feb 16 2001 - 09:58:40 PST