Here’s the idea: you don’t really know if you are the algorithm being simulated in Newcomb’s problem or the actual person.
The history of that idea:
Garry Drescher and Eliezer Yudkowsky, in their most polished respective works, were careful to avoid positively claiming that the “agent” in Omega’s prediction was the same as the actual agent, or had any experiences, and were also careful to make the reasoning work exactly the same either way.
However, this isn’t what is done in many cases. Even restricting to researchers that have extremely strong claims that they were not influenced by reading rumors on the Web, Radford M. Neal claims to have, in the 1980s, come to the conclusion that the agent in Newcomb’s problem has no way to be sure that it is not in the prediction[1]. Scott Aaronson had the same thought, but is still, I think, unwilling to conclusively endorse it. He did this around 2005. I suspect something similar to Radford Neal’s situation to be true of Vladimir Nesov, though in a way that puts the strict requirement on equality of abstract agents instead of computational agents, but I am unsure where this would be written. Currently, Nesov thinks agents that reside within the predictions of a superintelligence can sometimes be legitimate[2].
The history of that idea:
Garry Drescher and Eliezer Yudkowsky, in their most polished respective works, were careful to avoid positively claiming that the “agent” in Omega’s prediction was the same as the actual agent, or had any experiences, and were also careful to make the reasoning work exactly the same either way.
However, this isn’t what is done in many cases. Even restricting to researchers that have extremely strong claims that they were not influenced by reading rumors on the Web, Radford M. Neal claims to have, in the 1980s, come to the conclusion that the agent in Newcomb’s problem has no way to be sure that it is not in the prediction[1]. Scott Aaronson had the same thought, but is still, I think, unwilling to conclusively endorse it. He did this around 2005. I suspect something similar to Radford Neal’s situation to be true of Vladimir Nesov, though in a way that puts the strict requirement on equality of abstract agents instead of computational agents, but I am unsure where this would be written. Currently, Nesov thinks agents that reside within the predictions of a superintelligence can sometimes be legitimate[2].
Puzzles of Anthropic Reasoning Resolved Using Full Non-indexical Conditioning by Radford M. Neal, page 12, footnote 2
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fdCaCDfstHxyPmB9h/vladimir_nesov-s-shortform?commentId=6ixr3iDoyZPujJ7BW