At this point it seems we’re arguing over how to better formalize the original problem.
It’s more about making more explicit the question of what are observations, and what are boundaries of the agent (Which parts of the past lightcone are part of you? Just the cells in the brain? Why is that?), in deterministic decision problems. These were never explicitly considered before in the context of UDT. The problem statement states that something is “observation”, but we lack a technical counterpart of that notion. Your questions resulted from treating something that’s said to be an “observation” as epistemically relevant, writing knowledge about state of the territory which shouldn’t be logically transparent right into agent’s mind.
(Observations, possible worlds, etc. will very likely be the topic of my next post on ADT, once I resolve the mystery of observational knowledge to my satisfaction.)
Thanks, this looks like a fair summary (though a couple levels too abstract for my liking, as usual).
A note on epistemic relevance. Long ago, when we were just starting to discuss Newcomblike problems, the preamble usually went something like this: “Omega appears and somehow convinces you that it’s trustworthy”. So I’m supposed to listen to Omega’s words and somehow split them into an “epistemically relevant” part and an “observation” part, which should never mix? This sounds very shady. I hope we can disentangle this someday.
It’s more about making more explicit the question of what are observations, and what are boundaries of the agent (Which parts of the past lightcone are part of you? Just the cells in the brain? Why is that?), in deterministic decision problems. These were never explicitly considered before in the context of UDT. The problem statement states that something is “observation”, but we lack a technical counterpart of that notion. Your questions resulted from treating something that’s said to be an “observation” as epistemically relevant, writing knowledge about state of the territory which shouldn’t be logically transparent right into agent’s mind.
(Observations, possible worlds, etc. will very likely be the topic of my next post on ADT, once I resolve the mystery of observational knowledge to my satisfaction.)
Thanks, this looks like a fair summary (though a couple levels too abstract for my liking, as usual).
A note on epistemic relevance. Long ago, when we were just starting to discuss Newcomblike problems, the preamble usually went something like this: “Omega appears and somehow convinces you that it’s trustworthy”. So I’m supposed to listen to Omega’s words and somehow split them into an “epistemically relevant” part and an “observation” part, which should never mix? This sounds very shady. I hope we can disentangle this someday.