By the way I apologize for not directly addressing your points. The reason I’m not talking about indexicals or anything directly is that I think I can demonstrate a probable flaw in your argument while treating it entirely as a black box. The way that works: as an extreme example, imagine that I successfully demonstrated that a) every person on this site including you would, when actually dropped into these games, make the same moves as me, and that b) in order to come up with that answer, every person on this site including you goes through a mental process that looks a whole lot like “0.5 * 1000 > 0.5 * 999” and “0.25 * 1000 < 0.75 * 999″ even if they don’t have any words justifying why they are doing it that way. If that were the case, then I’d posit the following: 1) there is, with extremely high probability, some very reasonable sense in which those moves are “correct”/”mathematically justified”/”good strategies” etc, even if, for any specific one of those terms, we’re not comfortable labeling the moves as such, and therefore 2) with extremely high probability, any theory like yours which suggests that there is no correct move is at least one of a) using a new set of definitions but with no practical difference to actions (e.g. it will refuse to call the moves “correct”, but then will be forced to come up with some new term like “anthropically correct” to explain why they “anthropically recommend” that you make those moves even though they’re certainly not actually “correct”, in which case I don’t care about the wording), and/or b) flawed somewhere, even if I cannot yet figure out which sentence in the argument is wrong.
By the way I apologize for not directly addressing your points. The reason I’m not talking about indexicals or anything directly is that I think I can demonstrate a probable flaw in your argument while treating it entirely as a black box. The way that works: as an extreme example, imagine that I successfully demonstrated that a) every person on this site including you would, when actually dropped into these games, make the same moves as me, and that b) in order to come up with that answer, every person on this site including you goes through a mental process that looks a whole lot like “0.5 * 1000 > 0.5 * 999” and “0.25 * 1000 < 0.75 * 999″ even if they don’t have any words justifying why they are doing it that way. If that were the case, then I’d posit the following: 1) there is, with extremely high probability, some very reasonable sense in which those moves are “correct”/”mathematically justified”/”good strategies” etc, even if, for any specific one of those terms, we’re not comfortable labeling the moves as such, and therefore 2) with extremely high probability, any theory like yours which suggests that there is no correct move is at least one of a) using a new set of definitions but with no practical difference to actions (e.g. it will refuse to call the moves “correct”, but then will be forced to come up with some new term like “anthropically correct” to explain why they “anthropically recommend” that you make those moves even though they’re certainly not actually “correct”, in which case I don’t care about the wording), and/or b) flawed somewhere, even if I cannot yet figure out which sentence in the argument is wrong.