First off, if there’s a better place to ask this, I’d appreciate a nudge in that direction.

I’ve seen a lot of chatter on YouTube with Newcomb’s paradox lately (MinutePhysics Veritasium Wikipedia) and I’ve been dwelling on it more than I probably should.

To explain the problem briefly for the uninitiated: there is a super intelligent being that knows you to the core and can accurately (with 99.99+% accuracy) predict your actions/decisions. It has 2 boxes. You have the option to take either just the first box, or both boxes. In the first it always puts $1,000. In the second it will put either $1 million if it thinks you’ll take just the first box; or $0 if it thinks you’ll take both.

The apparent contradiction is explained in the videos.

So the solution to the problem I’ve come to is that you should remove your own ability to decide from your “decision” on whether to take the second box.

That is, you walk in the room, you flip a coin (or some similar random chooser) and on heads take both; on tails just take the first.

I think I’m failing to imagine all the consequences of this, but I can’t decide on what this would imply about the super intelligence’s choose of wether to put the $1 million into the box.

Any thoughts on this?

  • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
    2·
    14 hours ago

    I believe the universe is determinate

    That has been experimentally proven false and outside of all mainstream science.

    While you can have a supernatural belief in a clockwork universe, the premise is a supercomputer makes the prediction, not God.

    • Oka@sopuli.xyz
      1·
      13 hours ago

      Then the experiments may be flawed. We dont know what we dont know, but we have calculated a lot of “supernatural” phenomenon like gravity, physics, and light, to be computable mathematical formulae. Is it unthinkable to believe that everything can be computation then, if we were aware of every variable involved?

      There are a near infinite number of variables involved, but if we knew every variable, we could solve it.

      • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
        11·
        9 hours ago

        Then the experiments may be flawed. We dont know what we dont know

        That’s the same excuse flat Earthers make. Yes every single observation made over the past 100 years could have been wrong and tomorrow we find out that all of quantum mechanics is wrong.

        There are a near infinite number of variables involved, but if we knew every variable, we could solve it.

        Take a single electron. You can’t define it’s position and motion (momentum) simultaneously. It is fundamentally unsolvable. There aren’t even hidden variables that we are unaware of. Bell’s inequality has been experimentally proven many times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell’s_theorem