Decision-theoretic variant: build an agent that incorporates a quantum random number generator, such that with some small probability it will output a random action. Then have the agent calculate how much expected utility each action would imply if it were chosen because of the random number generator, and output the best one.
Unless I’m missing something, this agent doesn’t play very well in Newcomblike problems, but seems to be a good enough formalization of CDT. I cannot define it as formally as I’d like, though, because how do you write a computer program that refers to a specific quantum event in the outside world?
I’m not sure there is a way to make sense of such utility-definitions. What fixed question that relates to utility value is being answered by observing the result of a random number generator? Original state of the world is not clarified (both states of the random result were expected, not correlated with anything interesting), so state of knowledge about utility defined in terms of the original state of the world won’t be influenced by these observations, except accidentally.
Decision-theoretic variant: build an agent that incorporates a quantum random number generator, such that with some small probability it will output a random action. Then have the agent calculate how much expected utility each action would imply if it were chosen because of the random number generator, and output the best one.
Unless I’m missing something, this agent doesn’t play very well in Newcomblike problems, but seems to be a good enough formalization of CDT. I cannot define it as formally as I’d like, though, because how do you write a computer program that refers to a specific quantum event in the outside world?
I’m not sure there is a way to make sense of such utility-definitions. What fixed question that relates to utility value is being answered by observing the result of a random number generator? Original state of the world is not clarified (both states of the random result were expected, not correlated with anything interesting), so state of knowledge about utility defined in terms of the original state of the world won’t be influenced by these observations, except accidentally.