That’s fair, I tried to formulate a better definition but couldn’t immediately come up with anything that sidesteps the issue (without explicitly mentioning this class of problems).
When I taboo perfect rationality and instead just ask what the correct course of action is, I have to agree that I don’t have an answer. Intuitive answers to questions like “What would I do if I actually found myself in this situation?” and “What would the average intelligent person do?” are unsatisfying because they seem to rely on implicit costs to computational power/time.
On the other hand I can also not generalize this problem to more practical situations (or find a similar problem without optimal solution that would be applicable to reality) so there might not be any practical difference between a perfectly rational agent and an agent that takes the optimal solution if there is one and explodes violently if there isn’t one. Maybe the solution is to simply exclude problems like this when talking about rationality, unsatisfying as it may be.
That’s fair, I tried to formulate a better definition but couldn’t immediately come up with anything that sidesteps the issue (without explicitly mentioning this class of problems).
When I taboo perfect rationality and instead just ask what the correct course of action is, I have to agree that I don’t have an answer. Intuitive answers to questions like “What would I do if I actually found myself in this situation?” and “What would the average intelligent person do?” are unsatisfying because they seem to rely on implicit costs to computational power/time.
On the other hand I can also not generalize this problem to more practical situations (or find a similar problem without optimal solution that would be applicable to reality) so there might not be any practical difference between a perfectly rational agent and an agent that takes the optimal solution if there is one and explodes violently if there isn’t one. Maybe the solution is to simply exclude problems like this when talking about rationality, unsatisfying as it may be.
In any case, it is an interesting problem.