Omega can simulate people accurately down to the moment they choose, just as a programmer can run a program. Only a different person could have made a different choice, and Omega would also have foreseen that. You are not a person who makes a choice. You are a one-boxer or a two-boxer, and always have been. Even if you don’t know which you are until the moment you choose, that is only an example of your limited self-awareness, a limitation that Omega does not share.
There are two things you can do with Newcomb’s Problem. One is to outline arguments for one-boxing and two-boxing, along with whether and why they control your actual decision. This is mainly a formal, logical problem, though you can make illogical arguments too. This argument as a whole is in this category.
The other is to make a prediction about whether, in this scenario, you would take one box or two, and what would motivate that choice in the moment. These are questions about your personal psychology.
Underlying Newcomb’s Problem, then, lurks the is-ought problem.
Underlying Newcomb’s Problem, then, lurks the is-ought problem.
It’s interesting that you say this. I’ve been thinking a lot about what counterfactuals are at their base and one of the possibilities I’ve been considering is that maybe we can’t provide an objective answer due to the is-ought problem.
Hmm… it’s interesting that you’re writing this comment. I suppose it indicates that I didn’t make this point clearly enough?
I guess I probably should have expanded on this sentence: “From the view of pure reality, it’s important to understand that you can only make the choice you made and the past can only be as it was”.
It’s not that you didn’t make your point clearly enough! It’s that I have been confused by Newcomb’s problem in the past, so this was my attempt to re-express your idea in my own words and see if it still made sense. Would you say it correctly re-states your OP?
Omega can simulate people accurately down to the moment they choose, just as a programmer can run a program. Only a different person could have made a different choice, and Omega would also have foreseen that. You are not a person who makes a choice. You are a one-boxer or a two-boxer, and always have been. Even if you don’t know which you are until the moment you choose, that is only an example of your limited self-awareness, a limitation that Omega does not share.
There are two things you can do with Newcomb’s Problem. One is to outline arguments for one-boxing and two-boxing, along with whether and why they control your actual decision. This is mainly a formal, logical problem, though you can make illogical arguments too. This argument as a whole is in this category.
The other is to make a prediction about whether, in this scenario, you would take one box or two, and what would motivate that choice in the moment. These are questions about your personal psychology.
Underlying Newcomb’s Problem, then, lurks the is-ought problem.
It’s interesting that you say this. I’ve been thinking a lot about what counterfactuals are at their base and one of the possibilities I’ve been considering is that maybe we can’t provide an objective answer due to the is-ought problem.
Hmm… it’s interesting that you’re writing this comment. I suppose it indicates that I didn’t make this point clearly enough?
I guess I probably should have expanded on this sentence: “From the view of pure reality, it’s important to understand that you can only make the choice you made and the past can only be as it was”.
It’s not that you didn’t make your point clearly enough! It’s that I have been confused by Newcomb’s problem in the past, so this was my attempt to re-express your idea in my own words and see if it still made sense. Would you say it correctly re-states your OP?
Yeah, that’s the raw reality perspective. I guess the core point of my post was that there are two different perspectives.