I spoke with someone recently who admitted that Newcomb’s 1-boxers walk away from the problem with more money on average than 2-boxers, yet somehow still argued for 2-boxing.
Some people get so stubborn about the 1⁄3 answer to the Sleeping Beauty problem, they end up believing in absurd hypotheticals such as “the presumptuous philosopher”.
If there is anything distinct about philosophy, I’d say it’s the ease of getting stuck in wrong answers. Logical contradictions don’t make themselves apparent as well as they do in math, and reality doesn’t push back when hypotheticals are difficult to test or people disagree on the way models map reality.
But I also agree philosophy should be able to proceed like any other science. Heck, I may even have made very slight incremental progress on it myself (with particular observations on the SBP that I haven’t seen made before).
I spoke with someone recently who admitted that Newcomb’s 1-boxers walk away from the problem with more money on average than 2-boxers, yet somehow still argued for 2-boxing.
This doesn’t seem like a knock-down argument against 2-boxing.
Meta-level: the fact that 1-boxers walk away with more money on average is ~explicit in the problem statement. So if you know that 2-boxers exist, but you’re surprised to see 2-boxing coexist with acknowledgement of the fact that 1-boxers walk away with more money on average, then you’re probably modelling 2-boxers wrongly.
Object-level: some 2-boxers reject compatibilism. To the extent that their choice is deterministic and fully predictable, they don’t see it as an exercise of free will. The argument runs something like:
If determinism is true, then the two possibilities are [I 1-box and the history of the universe and laws of physics are such that I inevitably 1-box] and [I 2-box and the history of the universe and laws of physics are such that I inevitably 2-box].
I definitely can’t freely choose what the history of the universe or laws of physics are.
So, if determinism is true, then I don’t have a free choice between 1-boxing and 2-boxing.
So they decide that the possible world in which they are perfectly predictable is irrelevant. To whatever extent they do have free will, they will exercise it to take the extra $1000.
I spoke with someone recently who admitted that Newcomb’s 1-boxers walk away from the problem with more money on average than 2-boxers, yet somehow still argued for 2-boxing.
Some people get so stubborn about the 1⁄3 answer to the Sleeping Beauty problem, they end up believing in absurd hypotheticals such as “the presumptuous philosopher”.
If there is anything distinct about philosophy, I’d say it’s the ease of getting stuck in wrong answers. Logical contradictions don’t make themselves apparent as well as they do in math, and reality doesn’t push back when hypotheticals are difficult to test or people disagree on the way models map reality.
But I also agree philosophy should be able to proceed like any other science. Heck, I may even have made very slight incremental progress on it myself (with particular observations on the SBP that I haven’t seen made before).
This doesn’t seem like a knock-down argument against 2-boxing.
How not?
Meta-level: the fact that 1-boxers walk away with more money on average is ~explicit in the problem statement. So if you know that 2-boxers exist, but you’re surprised to see 2-boxing coexist with acknowledgement of the fact that 1-boxers walk away with more money on average, then you’re probably modelling 2-boxers wrongly.
Object-level: some 2-boxers reject compatibilism. To the extent that their choice is deterministic and fully predictable, they don’t see it as an exercise of free will. The argument runs something like:
If determinism is true, then the two possibilities are [I 1-box and the history of the universe and laws of physics are such that I inevitably 1-box] and [I 2-box and the history of the universe and laws of physics are such that I inevitably 2-box].
I definitely can’t freely choose what the history of the universe or laws of physics are.
So, if determinism is true, then I don’t have a free choice between 1-boxing and 2-boxing.
So they decide that the possible world in which they are perfectly predictable is irrelevant. To whatever extent they do have free will, they will exercise it to take the extra $1000.
Both meta-level and object-level make great points, thank you!