toto

OK. I assume the usual (Omega and Upsilon are both reliable and sincere, I can reliably distinguish one from the other, etc.)

Then I can't see how the game doesn't reduce to standard Newcomb, modulo a simple probability calculation, mostly based on "when I encounter one of them, what's my probability of meeting the other during my lifetime?" (plus various "actuarial" calculations).

If I have no information about the probability of encountering either, then my decision may be incorrect - but there's nothing paradoxical or surprising about this, it's just a normal, "boring" example of an incomplete information problem.

you need to have the correct prior/predisposition over all possible predictors of your actions, before you

I have problems with the "Giant look-up table" post.

"The problem isn't the levers," replies the functionalist, "the problem is that a GLUT has the wrong pattern of levers. You need levers that implement things like, say, formation of beliefs about beliefs, or self-modeling... Heck, you need the ability to write things to memory just so that time can pass for the computation. Unless you think it's possible to program a conscious being in Haskell."

If the GLUT is indeed behaving like a human, then it will need some sort of memory of previous inputs. A human's behaviour is dependent not just on the present state... (read more)

I don't know, to me he's just stating that the brain is the seat of sensation and reasoning.

Aristotle thought it was the heart. Both had arguments for their respective positions. Aristotle studied animals a lot and over-interpreted the evidence he had accumulated: to the naked eye the brain appears bloodless and unconnected to the organs; it is also insensitive, and can sustain some non-fatal damage; the heart, by contrast, reacts to emotions, is obviously connected to the entire body (through the circulatory system), and any damage to it leads to immediate death.

Also, in embryos the brain is typically formed much later than the heart. This is important if, like... (read more)

Yes, yes he did, time and again (substituting "copy" for "zombie", as MP points out below). That's the Star Trek paradox.

Imagine that there is a glitch in the system, so that the "original" Kirk fails to dematerialise when the "new" one appears, so we find ourselves with two copies of Kirk. Now Scotty says "Sowwy Captain" and zaps the "old" Kirk into a cloud of atoms. How in the world does that not constitute murder?

That was not the paradox. The "paradox" is this: the only difference between "innocuous" teleportation, and the murder scenario described above, is a small time-shift of a few seconds. If Kirk1 disappears a few seconds before Kirk2 appears,... (read more)

People who as their first reaction start pulling excuses why this must be wrong out >of their asses get big negative points on this rationality test.

Well, if people are absolutely, definitely rejecting the possibility that this might ever be true, without looking at the data, then they are indeed probably professing a tribal belief.

However, if they are merely describing reasons why they find this result "unlikely", then I'm not sure there's anything wrong with that. They're simply expressing that their prior for "Communist economies did no worse than capitalist economies" is, all other things being equal, lower than .5.

There are several non-obviously-wrong reasons why one could reasonably put a low prior... (read more)