On 12/11/2014 5:49 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 12 December 2014 at 12:22, Jason Resch <[email protected]> wrote:
On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 3:10 PM, LizR <[email protected]> wrote:
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.
It's probably not a true paradox, but why it seems like one is that
depending on which version of decision theory you use, you can be led to two
opposite conclusions. About half of people think one-boxing is best, and the
other half think two-boxing is best, and more often then not, people from
either side think people on the other side are idiots. However, for whatever
reason, everyone on this list seems to agree one-boxing is best, so you are
missing out on the interesting discussions that can arise from seeing people
justify their alternate decision.
Often two-boxers will say: the predictor's already made his decision, what
you decide now can't change the past or alter what's already been done. So
you're just leaving money on the table by not taking both boxes. An
interesting twist one two-boxer told me was: what would you do if both boxes
were transparent, and how does that additional information change what the
best choice is?
If both boxes were transparent, that would screw up the oracle's
ability to make the prediction, since there would be a feedback from
the oracle's attempt at prediction to the subject. The oracle can
predict if I'm going to pick head or tails, but the oracle *can't*
predict if I'm going to pick heads or tails if he tells me his
prediction then waits for me to make a decision.
Why not? If the oracle has a complete and accurate simulation of you then he can predict
your response to what he tells you - it's just that what he told you may then no longer be
truthful. Suppose he tells you he predicts you'll pick tails, but he actually predicts
that after hearing this you'll pick heads. It just means he lied. It's somewhat like the
unexpected hanging problem, if you reason from the premises given and you reach a
contradiction then the contradiction was implicit in the premises and no valid conclusion
follows from them.
Brent
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