Reading that into Maimonides is forced, in my opinion.

He writes explicitly that “His knowledge is not like our knowledge,” but not that He does not know, and it sounds like He does have knowledge, only it doesn’t work like our knowledge.

If so, then he didn’t answer his own question. But I’m not interested in clarifying his view, or other views on this issue. The point is to clarify the truth, and the truth is probably that He has no prior knowledge.

The claim people often make on this topic is that the Holy One is like an observer from the side, and time doesn’t operate for Him. Meaning, He knows what you’ll choose in an hour because for Him there are no concepts of time; and if you assume He does have concepts of time, then you’ve made Him limited.

Yes. I know these word games all too well. In my opinion they are groundless. Search the site for “knowledge and choice”; there are several discussions about it.

Has the Rabbi retracted what he wrote in “Two Carts”? That contradictions of the kind the Rabbi calls logical can exist? I myself still think that contradictions of this kind can exist, unlike analytic ones, in the Rabbi’s terminology. Like people wrote here: “His knowledge is not like our knowledge” means not that He doesn’t know, but that there is some similarity between it and our knowledge. Let’s say that His knowledge is more developed than ours and can grasp this, probably because of two things that are connected to each other in a way I still haven’t fully worked out for myself: 1. that our concept of the future is not really the future in reality itself, which in a certain sense still does not exist; 2. that the Holy One is not observing from the side. Some part of Him (?) is involved in reality itself (a kind of partial pantheism. I just went to check and saw that some call this intuition panentheism).

No. I agree in principle. The question is what the contradiction between knowledge and choice is like. Newcomb’s paradox says that it is not possible.
As for the word games between pantheism and panentheism, I’ve already written that I don’t understand them, and I’m not sure that those who say them understand them either.

I do agree with the Rabbi’s feeling about word games. But for me this intuition arose even before I was familiar with any “-ism” at all. The feeling comes from the fact that the people who invented these words weren’t philosophers or kabbalists; they were scholars of philosophy or Kabbalah. They’re occupied with an external, superficial categorization of those people and their systems. And it seems they really don’t understand a word of what they’re saying, for the simple reason that they aren’t really trying to understand the people they study. Otherwise they would themselves become philosophers or kabbalists. My feeling usually, for example when I read Spinoza, is that he sees something I don’t see, and I make an effort to see that thing. Once I succeed in seeing it, I no longer call it pantheism but reality. If someone tells me something different from Spinoza, I assume he too sees something, but from a different angle. After I see what he sees, I try to understand how these two seemingly different views do not contradict one another, and then “a third text comes and decides between them,” and I understand the complex overall reality that contains those two seemingly contradictory aspects. At that stage, at least regarding the specific issue I’m trying to understand, I am a greater philosopher than both philosophers. But “philosopher” (and also “kabbalist”) is a kind of derogatory term. There is simply reality.

By the way, this is a phenomenon that for some reason (I’m just saying that; obviously there is a reason) exists only in the humanities. There’s no such thing as “scholars of mathematics” or “scholars of physics” — mathematologists or physicologists. There are mathematicians and physicists, people who do and produce physics or mathematics. For some reason, in the world of spirit, the creators — writers, poets, musicians, philosophers, and kabbalists — are absent as such from the universities.

As for Newcomb’s paradox, my feeling is that prophecy — at least biblical prophecy — in a global sense is not simple prediction of the future. Rather, it is connected to human action and choice. For example, Jeremiah prophesies what will happen if they do not repent and what will happen if they do (“the Holy One never retracted a promise for good except for…”), but he never prophesies about the choice itself as such, the way Newcomb’s paradox does. In fact, prophecy is not detached from future reality, merely describing it from the outside, but participates in creating it. Jeremiah prophesies so that we will choose the good. He is not merely describing what will happen if we choose good or evil. And he is not an oracle at all. (Though there was indeed a concept of a seer, and that is admittedly a bit of a difficulty for me.) In that sense, prophecy pushes reality itself toward the people’s choosing the good, but again, without forcing it. And there is an almost mechanical-like mechanism of reality acting upon itself (Jeremiah and the Jewish people are part of the same organism, not just people who do things). This is my basic observation, and I have no way to prove it to the Rabbi.

In the humanities it seems that people “talk about” instead of doing “the thing itself.” Like the saying, “those who can’t do, teach” (it sounds better in English). There are “lecturers” instead of “teachers” — in the sense of a “teacher” in martial arts, where there is no distinction between doing and teaching; at a high level you need to start teaching in order to develop in the doing, and at a lower level you learn while doing, not through frontal lectures. And that is also true wherever people do what is called an internship, and it also explains why in every workplace they prefer experience over education. In other words, the humanities are the left side, unlike the natural sciences, which are the right or the center.

Ailon, I think you’re mistaken. First, in mathematics and physics too there are teachers who teach and do not create. True, in universities (as opposed to colleges and schools) they employ only people who also do research.
But in fact even in the university the analogy does exist, because physics and mathematics too were created by the Holy One, at least in my opinion, and I think you agree with me about that. So the researchers at the university are also only studying something that someone else created. In the humanities, the creations are human, so there is a category of creators there in addition to researchers.
See my article on this topic:

על המתודה הראויה בחקר מחשבת ישראל ומדעי הרוח

I read the article. Apparently the difference between studying the Holy One’s creation and studying man’s creation is essential. First of all, it seems that to study nature you need creativity. It is not mere discovery; there is a prior process of creating abstract conceptual categories. Many consider general relativity a scientific masterpiece. Hamilton called Lagrange’s analytical mechanics “scientific poetry.” Maxwell’s equations are considered “the most beautiful thing in physics” (to this day I enjoy reflecting on them). Seemingly, this could also exist in the study of Agnon’s poems, but for some reason I’ve never heard of a masterpiece by Kurzweil. (Although, by the way, I very much enjoy reading the interpretations of the Bible scholars Yehuda Kiel, Amos Hakham, and Mordechai Zer-Kavod in Da’at Mikra. There is no doubt a great deal of wisdom in that field — but I still would never use the expression “masterpiece.”) In addition, even in writing poetry and music there is a search for truth, and the musician searches for the best modes of expression for that truth. He is not merely “expressing what is in his heart” — unless the Rabbi meant that what is in his heart is also reality. But musicians and poets spend a long time refining and polishing the raw material that arises in their minds. It is not simply whatever comes to the poet — he writes. The creators, at least the great ones among them, in the spiritual world are regarded as channels into our world through which a higher truth descends, coming from a place higher than our world. Mathematicians and physicists too — again, at least the greatest among them — are regarded as creators, not researchers. Albert Einstein is not regarded as a researcher in physics. He is a physicist — physics is part of his very essence. If you had asked him what his profession was, he would have answered that he had no profession. (He feeds on the fragments of the tablets — the tablets of relativity.)

Second, and closely connected to the first claim: genius. There is no genius in humanities research. I have never heard of a scholar of music, literature, Bible, or Jewish thought who is a genius — unlike musicians or philosophers or writers, for example. That is of course not accidental. It stems from the close connection between creativity and genius, if they are not actually the same thing.

All this no longer seems to me like an essential difference. In fact the analogy exists completely; there are simply the usual differences between the humanities and the natural sciences — the level of talent required, the level of precision and depth, and so on. We’re back to the standard discussion, with which I of course completely agree.