Azathoth wants you to maximize your number of descendants; if you fail to have descendants, Azathoth will try not to have created you.

But this seems merely false. Azathoth just creates descendants whose ancestors reproduced. Azathoth isn't exerting any sort of foresight as to whether you reproduce. I can't figure out who or what you're trying to trade with. Not having children simply does not make you retroactively less likely to have existed.

I suppose you could be in a Newcomblike situation with your parents making a similar decision to have birthed you. I don't see how you could be in one with respect to Azathoth/evolution. It's not modeling you, it doesn't contain a computation similar to you, there is no logical update on what it does after you know your own decision.

My initial reaction is "This is all correct... except that Azerthoth isn't smart enough to have invented counter factual trade!". Just imagine trying to counterfactually trade with your past self from before you knew about counter-factual trade. A similar case is coming up with a great product you'd like to buy, only to discover when you get to the market you were the first to come up with the idea and nobody is selling the product despite that it'd be good for both of you if they had.

For further clarity here's a scenario where you reasoning probably WOULD work:

You find yourself on a planet, and you know this planet is in a phase of development in which conditions remain almost perfectly unchanged for 3^^^3 years/generations (the laws of physics would need to be different in this universe for this to work I think). The environment is also completely reset every few generations and only the extremely durable spores for the next generation is able to survive so there's no way to relay messages to the future. No tech solutions like directly editing and putting messages in the genes because you can't develop tech in a single generation.

If i lived on that planet I'd pay very close attention to the reasoning of this post. In the world that's unly existed for a few billion years and is about to hit the singularity, and where I've grown up in conditions completely different from my ancestors... not so much.

Good post thou, upvoted.

Q: Why does this knife have a handle?
A: This allows you to grasp it without cutting yourself.

These kinds of answers are highly compelling, but strictly speaking they are allowing events in the future to influence events in the past.

No, they aren't. They are answering the question according to the standard meaning conveyed with "Why?". When we use the word 'why' we mean a variety of things along the lines of 'What purpose does this serve?' as well as sometimes 'Explain the series of events that lead up to the final state in a convenient way'.

In standard usage if someone answers 'so you don't cut yourself' they usually are not talking about anything to do with temporal relations one way or the other.

The 'Azathoth problem' is isomorphic to the smoking lesion problem, which is not isomorphic to Newcomb's problem.

Hence, any decision theory capable of both (i) one-boxing in Newcomb's problem and (ii) choosing to smoke in the 'smoking lesion' problem will have no difficulty here.

EDIT: I'd better sketch out this "isomorphism": "smoking" = "acting virtuously, in defiance of our evolutionary drives", "not smoking" = "giving in to our instincts and trying to optimize number of children". "having the lesion... (read more)

You weren't created by Prometheus; you were created by Azathoth, The God That is Evolution by Natural Selection. You are the product of an ongoing optimization process that is trying to maximize reproductive fitness. Azathoth wants you to maximize your number of descendants; if you fail to have descendants, Azathoth will try not to have created you. If your intelligence reduces your reproduction rate, Azathoth will try not to grant you intelligence. If the Darwinian-optimal choice conflicts with the moral one, Azathoth wants you to choose evil.

It woul

I would zero-box, so that I could exist twice.

It's dangerous to update after observing your own existence because no counterfactual you can update on their non-existence so your updates can't possibly make sense in aggregate.

Onebox in Part 1 if you value your existence because the probability of your one-boxing directly determines the probability of you existing and Prometheus accepts or rejects you as a package. You need not bother (much) with Azathoth because he's an idiot, has no predictive abilities at all beyond the simplest form of induction, only took the effects of (some of) the parts that make you up in completely different combinations into account, and what your ancestors did is much more weakly entangled with what you are going to do.

How does Prometheus being wrong make me cease to exist?

By creating a simulation to interrogate, Omega/Prometheus/Azathoth have brought a being into existence, which means the being may have preferences to continue to exist (in some other form). So I'd tend to pick B for Prometheus, to continue existing. I wouldn't do so for Azathoth, because evolution doesn't have to create a living version of me to see what I would do; there is no "I" to regret dying or not existing there.

Your idea sounds plausible and interesting, but I don't completely understand the implications. What am I supposed to do if the environment changes from generation to generation, e.g. due to advances in science? Should I adopt the behaviors that helped my ancestors have many kids, or the behaviors that will help me have many kids?

Others in this thread have pointed this out, but I will try to articulate my point a little more clearly.

Decision theories that require us to two-box do so because we have incomplete information about the environment. We might be in a universe where Omega thinks that we'll one-box; if we think that Omega is nearly infallible, we increase this probability by choosing to one-box. Note that probability is about our own information, not about the universe. We're not modifying the universe, we're refining our estimates.

If the box is transparent, and we can see ... (read more)

So...if Prometheus created you to one-box, and you should one-box anyway...why not one-box? "Too much useless information" alarm bells are ringing in my head.

Edit: Italics to quotes.

Edit2: I failed to read. See this comment

Ok, so as I understand timeless decision theory, one wants to honor precommitments that one would have made if the outcome actually depended on the answer regardless of whether or not the outcome actually depends on the answer or not. The reason for this seems to be that behaving as a timeless decision agent makes your behavior predictable to other timeless decision theoretical agents (including your future selves), and therefore big wins can be had all around for all, especially when trying to predict your own future behavior.

So, if you buy the idea that... (read more)

I don't get it. I do exist. If I never reproduce, then Azathoth predicted incorrectly (which will hardly be the first time).

(I also agree with the response that the universe isn't better off for having me in it, but that doesn't matter, since it has me anyway.)

I don't get it. Is this supposed to be some weird form of evidential or maybe timeless decision theory? It hardly matters; whatever decision theory you're using, you already know you exist; conditioning on the possibility that you don't is nonsensical. Hell, even if you're an AI using UDT you gain nothing from not assuming you exist; you were built to not update in the normal sense because whoever built you cared about all possible worlds you might end up in, but regardless, if you're standing there making the decision, you exist (i.e. this can be assumed at the start and taken into account).

Edit: Just for the purpose of explicitness, I should probably state that the conclusion here is that you should two-box in this case.

For this specific formulation of the question, I think it may be relevant to know whether Prometheus updates on your decisions in order to improve his projections on whether future individuals will one box or two box.

What was the point of reposting this after it was in the discussion section, without seeming to edit it in response to comments since then?

I think the primary reason why this Prometheus problem is flawed is that in Newcomb's problem, the presence or absence of the million dollars is unknown, while in this Prometheus problem, you already know what Prometheus did as a result of his prediction. Think of a variation on Newcomb's problem where Omega allows you to look inside box B before choosing, and you see that it is full. Only an idiot would take only one box in that scenario, and that's why this analysis is flawed.

"You were created by a god: a being called Prometheus. Prometheus was neither omniscient nor particularly benevolent. He was given a large set of blueprints for possible human embryos, and for each blueprint that pleased him he created that embryo and implanted it in a human woman. Here was how he judged the blueprints: any that he guessed would grow into a person who would choose only Box B in this situation, he created. If he judged that the embryo would grow into a person who chose both boxes, he filed that blueprint away unused. Prometheus's

This seems to highlight my main complaint with Newcomb's problem. It assumes reverse causation is possible. Perhaps I'm being narrow minded, but, "Assume reverse causation is possible. How do you deal with this hypothetical?" does not mean you should actually design a decision theory to take into account reverse causation, without adequate evidence it exists.