It’s easy to construct a thought experiment with contradictory premises, and not notice if you keep math and pictures out of it. Draw pictures, show the math. It makes normal problems easier, and helps you notice when a problem boils down to “could an unstoppable force move an immovable object?”, and then you can move on.
The unstoppable force being Omega’s prediction ability, and the immovable object being causality only propagating forward in time. Two-boxers answer “unmovable object,” one-boxers answer “unstoppable force.”
I’m confused by what you mean here about Newcomb’s problem, if you say that two-boxers and one-boxers are both failing to dissolve the question. Do you mean that one particular argument for two-boxing and one particular argument for one-boxing are failures to dissolve the question (but that one or the other decision is still valid)? Or do you mean that Newcomb’s Problem is an impossible situation which doesn’t approximate anything we might really face, and therefore we should stop worrying about it and move on? Or do you mean something different entirely?
Or do you mean that Newcomb’s Problem is an impossible situation which doesn’t approximate anything we might really face, and therefore we should stop worrying about it and move on?
This is my personal opinion, though I do not expect everyone to agree. I would go further and say that its connection to real situations is too tenuous to be valuable- many impossible scenarios are worth thinking about because they closely approximate real scenarios. The previous sentence- that any one explanation of why two-boxing or one-boxing is correct fails to understand why it’s a problem- is something I expect everyone should agree with.
Well, then we have a bigger disagreement at stake. Also:
The previous sentence- that any one explanation of why two-boxing or one-boxing is correct fails to understand why it’s a problem- is something I expect everyone should agree with.
You switched the quantifier on my question, and your version is much stronger than anything I’d agree to, much less expect to be uncontroversial.
I’m confused by what you mean here about Newcomb’s problem, if you say that two-boxers and one-boxers are both failing to dissolve the question. Do you mean that one particular argument for two-boxing and one particular argument for one-boxing are failures to dissolve the question (but that one or the other decision is still valid)? Or do you mean that Newcomb’s Problem is an impossible situation which doesn’t approximate anything we might really face, and therefore we should stop worrying about it and move on? Or do you mean something different entirely?
This is my personal opinion, though I do not expect everyone to agree. I would go further and say that its connection to real situations is too tenuous to be valuable- many impossible scenarios are worth thinking about because they closely approximate real scenarios. The previous sentence- that any one explanation of why two-boxing or one-boxing is correct fails to understand why it’s a problem- is something I expect everyone should agree with.
Well, then we have a bigger disagreement at stake. Also:
You switched the quantifier on my question, and your version is much stronger than anything I’d agree to, much less expect to be uncontroversial.