Harry’s error in the experiment was responding to “DO NOT MESS WITH TIME” with the same. If he didn’t have the property of responding to that message with the same, that message wouldn’t appear.
Actually, this whole consistency-based time travel seems to be an extremely expressive thought experiment infrastructure for thinking about Newcomb-like problems and decision theories able to deal with them. Maybe I should do a top-level post on that (I don’t have a sufficiently clear picture of the setting, so I might be wrong about its potential)… Though I consider that happening unlikely, so other people who understand UDT are welcome to try.
I was thinking exactly the same thing. After getting my head around the implications it seems to be an extremely intuitive way of handling such problems. I didn’t write a post myself since I have yet to look close enough at UDT to be able to explain the difference between UDT and TDT.
Harry’s error in the experiment was responding to “DO NOT MESS WITH TIME” with the same. If he didn’t have the property of responding to that message with the same, that message wouldn’t appear.
Actually, this whole consistency-based time travel seems to be an extremely expressive thought experiment infrastructure for thinking about Newcomb-like problems and decision theories able to deal with them. Maybe I should do a top-level post on that (I don’t have a sufficiently clear picture of the setting, so I might be wrong about its potential)… Though I consider that happening unlikely, so other people who understand UDT are welcome to try.
I was thinking exactly the same thing. After getting my head around the implications it seems to be an extremely intuitive way of handling such problems. I didn’t write a post myself since I have yet to look close enough at UDT to be able to explain the difference between UDT and TDT.