On 11 December 2014 at 18:59, Stathis Papaioannou <[email protected]> wrote:
> > On Thursday, December 11, 2014, LizR <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Maybe it's a delayed choice experiment and retroactively collapses the >> wave function, so your choice actually *does* determine the contents of >> the boxes. >> >> (Just a thought...maybe the second box has a cat in it...) >> >> No such trickery is required. Consider the experiment where the subject > is a computer program and the clairvoyant is you, with the program's source > code and inputs. You will always know exactly what the program will do by > running it, including all its deliberations. If it is the sort of program > that decides to choose both boxes it will lose the million dollars. The > question of whether it *ought to* choose both boxes or one is meaningless > if it is a deterministic program, and the paradox arises from failing to > understand this. > > Not trickery, how dare you?! An attempt to give a meaningful answer which actually makes something worthwhile from what appears to be a trivial "paradox" without any real teeth. But OK since you are determined to belittle my efforts, let's try your approach. 1 wait 10 seconds 2 print "after careful consideration, I have decided to open both boxes" 3 stop This is what ANY deterministic computer programme (with no added random inputs) would boil down to, although millions of lines of code might take a while to analyse, and the simplest way to find out the answer in practice might be to run it (but each run would give the same result, so once it's been run once we can replace it with my simpler version). I have to admit I can't see where the paradox is, or why there is any interest in discussing it. My point, in case it wasn't clear, was that there is only a possible paradox (or at least something worth discussing) if the oracle is unreliable. But NP is stated in terms of a deterministic universe and an oracle that can foresee the future 100% accurately, so the only *possibility* of a paradox arises if it can be turned into a "grandfather paradox" via time-travel, which is what I suggested. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
