Q&A: Newcomb in “No Person Has Power Over His Spirit”
Newcomb in "No Person Has Power Over His Spirit"
Question
I don’t understand why the experiment contradicts both foreknowledge and free choice at the same time.
In the experiment there is an additional assumption: that the chooser knows about the knower’s knowledge. We have no such knowledge, so why assume that this is possible?
And in general, when I think about knowledge of the future together with free choice, it doesn’t seem contradictory. Like a parent who knows his child very well will be able to make a very good guess about what the child will choose (assuming the child develops and changes and the parent knows the child and the changes he is going through [and that he really does choose, and is not predetermined in a deterministic way]).
By analogy to the Creator of the world, only with greater abilities.
The knowledge does not fix me in place because I am not aware of someone external to me knowing it (the experiment assumes that I know).
Answer
First of all, a sharpening of the claim: the experiment does not contradict both of them. The knowledge contradicts freedom of choice, and the experiment is the proof of that.
If the prophet tells the chooser that he knows what the chooser will do, will the chooser not hear him? Who is preventing him from telling the chooser that he knows? By the way, many believers think that God knows their actions. So according to their view, it is indeed possible to know about the prophet’s knowledge.
As for your suggestion that there is no contradiction, see the columns that dealt with this (299 and onward). It is discussed there at much greater length.
Discussion on Answer
A clarification: I can point to any random person and say that I know he will not commit suicide this year. And lo and behold, I will be right 99.9994% of the time. For some reason, here, I imagine that it does not feel to you as though I am denying the ability of the individual I pointed to to commit suicide.
Regarding the example of the parent and his child: you yourself wrote “a guess”—that is essentially different from knowledge. A guess, by definition, can fail, even if the odds are very much in your favor. A parent may be able to predict with 99% accuracy, but that is still not knowledge; it is just an expression of the distribution of the child’s choices in his psychological, cognitive, etc. state. (Maybe the last paragraph was a bit unclear. Michi explains the environmental influences using the example of a ball—something without choice—rolling among hills, and we know with certainty that in the end it will reach the lowest place. In contrast, a person can climb the hill, but there is still a higher chance that he will go downhill rather than climb upward. That is, if you have a lot of data about a given person—like your child—you can approximately predict his choices, but you cannot know with certainty in a specific given case.)