[I deleted my earlier reply, because I was still confused about your questions.]
If, according to R’s decision theory, the most preferred choice involves programming S to output “give $0”, then that is what S would do.
It might be easier to think of the ideal S as consisting of a giant lookup table created by R itself given infinite time and computing power. An actual S would try to approximate this ideal to the best of its abilities.
How should S decide, from its inputs, which R is the creator with the expected utility S’s outputs should be optimal for? Is it the R in the world where Omega’s coin came up heads, or the R in the world where Omega’s coin came up tails?
R would encode its own decision theory, prior, utility function, and memory at the time of coding into S, and have S optimize for that R.
Sorry. I wasn’t trying to ask my questions as questions about how R would make decisions. I was asking questions to try to answer your question about the relationship between exceptionless and timeless decision-making, by pointing out dimensions of a map of ways for R to make decisions. For some of those ways, S would be “timeful” around R’s beliefs or time of coding, and for some of those ways S would be less timeful.
I have an intuition that there is a version of reflective consistency which requires R to code S so that, if R was created by another agent Q, S would make decisions using Q’s beliefs even if Q’s beliefs were different from R’s beliefs (or at least the beliefs that a Bayesian updater would have had in R’s position), and even when S or R had uncertainty about which agent Q was. But I don’t know how to formulate that intuition to something that could be proven true or false. (But ultimately, S has to be a creator of its own successor states, and S should use the same theory to describe its relation to its past selves as to describe its relation to R or Q. S’s decisions should be invariant to the labeling or unlabeling of its past selves as “creators”. These sequential creations are all part of the same computational process.)
[I deleted my earlier reply, because I was still confused about your questions.]
If, according to R’s decision theory, the most preferred choice involves programming S to output “give $0”, then that is what S would do.
It might be easier to think of the ideal S as consisting of a giant lookup table created by R itself given infinite time and computing power. An actual S would try to approximate this ideal to the best of its abilities.
R would encode its own decision theory, prior, utility function, and memory at the time of coding into S, and have S optimize for that R.
Sorry. I wasn’t trying to ask my questions as questions about how R would make decisions. I was asking questions to try to answer your question about the relationship between exceptionless and timeless decision-making, by pointing out dimensions of a map of ways for R to make decisions. For some of those ways, S would be “timeful” around R’s beliefs or time of coding, and for some of those ways S would be less timeful.
I have an intuition that there is a version of reflective consistency which requires R to code S so that, if R was created by another agent Q, S would make decisions using Q’s beliefs even if Q’s beliefs were different from R’s beliefs (or at least the beliefs that a Bayesian updater would have had in R’s position), and even when S or R had uncertainty about which agent Q was. But I don’t know how to formulate that intuition to something that could be proven true or false. (But ultimately, S has to be a creator of its own successor states, and S should use the same theory to describe its relation to its past selves as to describe its relation to R or Q. S’s decisions should be invariant to the labeling or unlabeling of its past selves as “creators”. These sequential creations are all part of the same computational process.)