This is probably too trivial a point to mention, but FWIW:
“Try, for example, to make the two whiteboards different. Imagine that you’ll get ten million dollars if you succeed. It doesn’t matter: you’ll fail. Your most whimsical impulse, your most intricate mental acrobatics, your special-est snowflake self, will never suffice”
I know you specified that both AIs are internally deterministic and have identical inputs (rooms, whiteboards etc), but if I were them I’d try and seek out some indeterminacy elsewhere. Eg go out of the door, get some dice (or quantum random number generator), and toss them to decide what to write on the whiteboard, and thereby get two different results. Or just draw the night sky on the whiteboard (which will differ if they’re light-years apart); note this doesn’t require any indeterminacy in the universe, merely a lack of universal symmetry to break the Twin Earth setup.
To which you’d respond, well let’s say the AI can’t do that (it can’t move, etc.)
(And ex hypothesi it can’t create indeterminacy within the room, eg by tossing the board marker, because the rooms are identically set up, including air molecules etc.)
ADDED: though maybe it could say something Basilisk-like that would (or might sometimes) persuade someone else to provide an indeterministic or night-sky-like input. But if its only means of communication or action is writing on the whiteboard, and only the first thing it writes counts (or it can only write once), that wouldn’t work.
This is probably too trivial a point to mention, but FWIW:
“Try, for example, to make the two whiteboards different. Imagine that you’ll get ten million dollars if you succeed. It doesn’t matter: you’ll fail. Your most whimsical impulse, your most intricate mental acrobatics, your special-est snowflake self, will never suffice”
I know you specified that both AIs are internally deterministic and have identical inputs (rooms, whiteboards etc), but if I were them I’d try and seek out some indeterminacy elsewhere. Eg go out of the door, get some dice (or quantum random number generator), and toss them to decide what to write on the whiteboard, and thereby get two different results. Or just draw the night sky on the whiteboard (which will differ if they’re light-years apart); note this doesn’t require any indeterminacy in the universe, merely a lack of universal symmetry to break the Twin Earth setup.
To which you’d respond, well let’s say the AI can’t do that (it can’t move, etc.)
(And ex hypothesi it can’t create indeterminacy within the room, eg by tossing the board marker, because the rooms are identically set up, including air molecules etc.)
ADDED: though maybe it could say something Basilisk-like that would (or might sometimes) persuade someone else to provide an indeterministic or night-sky-like input. But if its only means of communication or action is writing on the whiteboard, and only the first thing it writes counts (or it can only write once), that wouldn’t work.