A formal version of which argument? That quined states of knowledge are possible? Or that there are circumstances where embedded perfect knowledge can’t work after all? The latter is similar to impossibility of compressing every possible file, there are more states in longer files, so there is no injection to the set of states of shorter files. So if the embedded agent is smaller than half of environment, it can’t encode the environment that exists outside of it, even if it’s free to set its own state.
But if you don’t have to compress every possible file, only likely files, then compression works fine and can be used to construct quines. It’s sufficient to be able to compress “files with holes”. Then all you need is put these holes over locations where representation of the world needs to go, compress the rest of the world, and finally put the compressed data where the holes used to be.
A formal version of which argument? That quined states of knowledge are possible? Or that there are circumstances where embedded perfect knowledge can’t work after all? The latter is similar to impossibility of compressing every possible file, there are more states in longer files, so there is no injection to the set of states of shorter files. So if the embedded agent is smaller than half of environment, it can’t encode the environment that exists outside of it, even if it’s free to set its own state.
But if you don’t have to compress every possible file, only likely files, then compression works fine and can be used to construct quines. It’s sufficient to be able to compress “files with holes”. Then all you need is put these holes over locations where representation of the world needs to go, compress the rest of the world, and finally put the compressed data where the holes used to be.