Q&A: Question about Newcomb's paradox
Question about Newcomb's paradox
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I read in The Science of Freedom about Newcomb's paradox, and I don't understand the point.
If there is a prophet, he will always know what you will ultimately choose. When a person comes to take the closed box and then decides to take both because he claims that the prophet already chose, the prophet already foresaw all this philosophizing too, and therefore from the outset he put nothing in the empty box because he knew that the chooser would think that… (what I said before)
Thanks in advance.
Answer
That too I know how to predict. After all, everyone predicts that the person will take both boxes and therefore will leave the closed one empty.
It's like the prophecy of Moses our teacher, "He turned this way and that way and saw that there was no man," which according to Rashi means that he saw that no one would descend from him who would convert. That prophecy I also know how to make, since if I kill him then certainly no one will descend from him.
What I asked there was what the optimal strategy is that the person should choose. Here you enter a loop.
Discussion on Answer
I'm not asking how the prophet knows, but what the chooser's strategy is supposed to be. Seemingly, to take only the closed box. Then it is supposed to be full. But now what prevents him from taking the open one too? In any case, that is the preferable strategy from his point of view, because whatever is in the closed box is already there. In other words, it cannot be that the strategy before him now is to take only the closed box, because whatever is in the closed box is already there and he can only gain another thousand.
So it could be that in such a case there is no possibility of foreknowledge.
But in a case that is not the paradox, there would be such a thing. When the knowledge is, so to speak, in heaven.
There is another option: that his choice changes reality (that is, that the money inside the box disappears). This is the option least accepted by people, because from their point of view it is changing past reality through an action from the future. But it could be that the money simply disappears at that moment. That is, a miracle. That is, the prophecy created the reality and did not merely report it. This too is a kind of foreknowledge (knowledge that creates reality), just not exactly knowledge like ours.
Hello Rabbi,
I just read this section in the second book of the trilogy, and I had exactly the same question as the one asked here.
I read your first and second answers and I still have a problem: it seems to me that there is a kind of "game" here with the definitions of the paradox itself. If we are talking about a true prophet who is right 100% of the time (although in the original article that is not exactly the case), I think there is no scenario like the one you describe—namely, that the person chooses the correct strategy, honestly choosing the closed box for the million, opens it and takes the prize, and afterward gets the idea of taking the second one too and adding the thousand to the prize. It seems to me that according to the definition, in such a case when the person opened the closed box he would find it empty—since if he is sincere, he would surely think the prophet is a lying fraud who did not intend to pay him a million, but that is not the point. If the prophet really knows the future, then he knows that the person is sincere in his first choice and that the idea will occur to him afterward and he will not be able to restrain himself and will take the second one too, and therefore already when opening the closed box it will be empty.
Isn't that so?
Forgive me, but too much time has passed to continue the discussion.
Unfortunately I don't understand what kind of loop…
You can agonize and philosophize. It makes no difference to a prophet whether you changed your mind a thousand times or once and took the box. He will simply know what your final choice is and act accordingly…