UDT tries to sidestep the problem. Instead of having a module that must decide in a binary way whether something is or isn’t a copy of itself, it instead uses its “math intuition module” to determine how much “logical correlation” exists between something and itself (i.e., computes the conditional probabilities of various outcomes depending on its decisions). The idea is that hopefully once we understand how logical uncertainty is supposed to work, this will just work automatically without having to have “extra code” for figuring out what things in the world count as copies.
Ok—but I don’t see that as being any better than CDT. In both cases we need a working module (that we don’t have) to make the theory work.
My argument is that every agent needs a solution to logical uncertainty anyway, otherwise it would be unable to, for example, decide whether or not to spend resources looking for a polynomial time solution to 3-SAT (or can only decide things like this in a haphazard way). So with CDT, you would need an extra module that we don’t have.
UDT tries to sidestep the problem. Instead of having a module that must decide in a binary way whether something is or isn’t a copy of itself, it instead uses its “math intuition module” to determine how much “logical correlation” exists between something and itself (i.e., computes the conditional probabilities of various outcomes depending on its decisions). The idea is that hopefully once we understand how logical uncertainty is supposed to work, this will just work automatically without having to have “extra code” for figuring out what things in the world count as copies.
Ok—but I don’t see that as being any better than CDT. In both cases we need a working module (that we don’t have) to make the theory work.
UDT is better than CDT because it allows correlations with “non-copies”; I think we should focus on that, not on CDT’s lack of copy-finding modules.
My argument is that every agent needs a solution to logical uncertainty anyway, otherwise it would be unable to, for example, decide whether or not to spend resources looking for a polynomial time solution to 3-SAT (or can only decide things like this in a haphazard way). So with CDT, you would need an extra module that we don’t have.