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Ok, a programme is decfacto deterministic: it must do whatever it can do, even though that is only one thing.
But what's the reason to think the brain is deterministic?
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Any decision made any way will.increase the mutual information between the organism and it's environment because the consequences of the decision will become part of the environment.
In any case, EY wasn't describing how decision making must occur, or how belief formation must occur, but how belief formationshould occur.
2RHollerith
If I make a "quantum measurement" (the kind of thing that routinely causes the world to split, e.g., measuring the spin of an electron) then I receive one bit of information, namely, which branch I ended up in. Information is conserved; I only received one bit of information; one entire bit is required to indicate which branch I ended up in; consequently, I must have learned nothing about the original unsplit world. Do you see now?
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There's a joke patterned after an old TV commercial (about seatbelt wearing) of the 1960s or 1970s: "Gravity: it's not just a good idea; it's the the law". The same thing is true about Eliezer post "What is evidence?": namely, for any organism or system to use beliefs to maintain homeostasis, to survive or to steer reality at all requires mutual information between the organism and its environment. It is not just a good idea.
I see that you didn't learn anything about the pre-split world, but I don't see why that matters. Again, the epistemic rule that you can only learn from evidence that is causally related to the thing it is evidence of....doesn't obviously apply to action. Learning has a world->mind arrow, action has a mind->world arrow.
The same thing is true about Eliezer post “What is evidence?”: namely, for any organism or system to use beliefs to maintain homeostasis, to survive or to steer reality at all requires mutual information between the organism and its ... (read more)