Newcomb’s paradox
Hello Rabbi.
On Shabbat, I had a conversation at the school with a mathematics doctor and asked his opinion on the famous contradiction between knowledge and choice, and in particular on Newcomb’s paradox. I burst into an open door and he happily brought up a host of paradoxical equations and even paradoxical geometry, but surprisingly, he still thought that God knows and we are allowed to choose. It turned out that he is from the strange school of mathematicians who think that mathematics is a narrow local language that describes subjective reality and “there are things that our minds fall short of achieving” 🙄
Anyway, he said something, and as a shy person who doesn’t study, I just nodded my head and thought I understood.
The argument was, in my words: ‘Since we cannot choose both options at the same time and must necessarily choose only one of them, there is no disadvantage in having the information about which option to choose.’
Maybe I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I have no way of asking him. Does the Rabbi understand anything about this claim? Or is it meaningless (he said all sorts of other things about it but I don’t remember exactly and it seems to me that it was an explanation of the claim and not an expansion)
thanks
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