I have more or less the same point of view and applied it to non iterated prisonner’s dilemma (as Newcomb’s is merely half a Prisonner’s Dilemma as David Lewis suggested in an article, and on this I agree with him, but not on his conclusion).
What is at stakes here (in Newcomb’s or PD) may not be that easy to accept anyway. It’s probability and Bayes against causality. The doom loop in Newcomb’s (reasoning loop leading to loose 1 million, as I see it) is stating that The content of the boxes is already put when you play, henceforth you action won’t change anything. The quantum mechanical reasoning would go the other way: as long as you did’nt observe/interact with it it is merely a probability. You may even want to go futher than that: imagine that someone else see the content of the box, then see you choosing the predicted set of boxes. He will conclude you have no freewill, or something along theses lines. I understand that people puting freewill as a fact—not merely a belief that could be contradicted by experiment—and so reject unthinkingly the probabilist reasoning.
I have more or less the same point of view and applied it to non iterated prisonner’s dilemma (as Newcomb’s is merely half a Prisonner’s Dilemma as David Lewis suggested in an article, and on this I agree with him, but not on his conclusion).
What is at stakes here (in Newcomb’s or PD) may not be that easy to accept anyway. It’s probability and Bayes against causality. The doom loop in Newcomb’s (reasoning loop leading to loose 1 million, as I see it) is stating that The content of the boxes is already put when you play, henceforth you action won’t change anything. The quantum mechanical reasoning would go the other way: as long as you did’nt observe/interact with it it is merely a probability. You may even want to go futher than that: imagine that someone else see the content of the box, then see you choosing the predicted set of boxes. He will conclude you have no freewill, or something along theses lines. I understand that people puting freewill as a fact—not merely a belief that could be contradicted by experiment—and so reject unthinkingly the probabilist reasoning.
My comment about PD is in this Sequence (http://lesswrong.com/lw/hl8/other_prespective_on_resolving_the_prisoners/). I merely applty probability rules. I’m interrested to know if you see any fault in it from a probabilist point of view.