>From Wei Dai, Thu, 15 Feb 2001 05:00:23: <<< Sentient beings can follow the same decision procedure used by the oracle. Suppose you are faced with a bet involving a tossed coin. There is no need to consider probabilistic questions like "what is the probability that the coin landed heads?" which would involve anthropic reasoning. You know that there are worlds where it landed heads and worlds where it landed tails, and that there are instances of you in all of these worlds which are indistinguishable from each other from the first-person perspective. You can make the decision by considering the consequences of each choice if all instances of you were to make that choice. <<<
This reminds me of excellent recent work by Marcus Hutter: "Towards a universal theory of AI based on algorithmic probability and sequential decision theory" ftp://ftp.idsia.ch/pub/techrep/IDSIA-14-00.ps.gz JS
