List of Problems That Motivated UDT

[Wei Dai]

I noticed that recently I wrote several comments of the form “UDT can be seen as a step towards solving X” and thought it might be a good idea to list in one place all of the problems that helped motivate UDT1 (not including problems that came up subsequent to that post).

• decision making for minds that can copy themselves

• Doomsday Argument

• Sleeping Beauty

• Absent-Minded Driver

• Presumptuous Philosopher

• anthropic reasoning for non-sentient AIs

• Simulation Argument

• indexical uncertainty in general

• wireheading/​Cartesianism (how to formulate something like AIXI that cares about an external world instead of just its sensory inputs)

• How to make decisions if all possible worlds exist? (a la Tegmark or Schmidhuber, or just in the MWI)

• Quantum Immortality/​Suicide

• Logical Uncertainty (how to formulate something like Godel machine that can make reasonable decisions involving P=NP)

• uncertainty about hypercomputation (how to avoid assuming we must be living in a computable universe)

• What are probabilities?

• What are decisions and what kind of consequences should be considered when making decisions?

• Newcomb’s Problem

• Smoking Lesion

• Prisoner’s Dilemma

• Counterfactual Mugging

• FAI