If you’re uncertain about whether or not your blackmailer has heard of your pre-commitment, then you should act as if they have, and ignore their blackmail accordingly. This also applies to agents who have deleted knowledge of your pre-commitment from their memories; you want to punish agents who spend time trying to think up loopholes in your pre-commitment, not reward them. The harder part, of course, is determining what threshold of uncertainty is required; to this I freely admit that I don’t know the answer.
Hmmm. If an agent can work out what threshold of uncertainty you have decided on, and then engineer a situation where you think it it less likely than that threshold that the agent has heard of your pre-commitment, then your strategy will fail.
So, even if you do find a way to calculate the ideal threshold, then it will fail against an agent smart enough to repeat that calculation; unless, of course, you simply assume that all possible agents have necessarily heard of your pre-commitment (since an agent cannot engineer a less than 0% chance of failing to hear of your pre-commitment). This, however, causes the strategy to simplify to “always reject blackmail, whether or not the agent has heard of your pre-commitment”.
Alternatively, you can ensure that any agent able to capture you in a simulation must also know of your pre-commitment; for example, by having it tattooed on yourself somewhere (thus, any agent which rebuilds a simulation of your body must include the tattoo, and therefore must know of the pre-commitment).
Hmmm. If an agent can work out what threshold of uncertainty you have decided on, and then engineer a situation where you think it it less likely than that threshold that the agent has heard of your pre-commitment, then your strategy will fail.
So, even if you do find a way to calculate the ideal threshold, then it will fail against an agent smart enough to repeat that calculation; unless, of course, you simply assume that all possible agents have necessarily heard of your pre-commitment (since an agent cannot engineer a less than 0% chance of failing to hear of your pre-commitment). This, however, causes the strategy to simplify to “always reject blackmail, whether or not the agent has heard of your pre-commitment”.
Alternatively, you can ensure that any agent able to capture you in a simulation must also know of your pre-commitment; for example, by having it tattooed on yourself somewhere (thus, any agent which rebuilds a simulation of your body must include the tattoo, and therefore must know of the pre-commitment).