In “Paper, Stone, Scissors,” like in other contests and conflicts, (and same as in humour), you just need to be unpredicted, not really to be “unpredictable”. True complete unpredictability is neither good humour (“Two men walk into a bar, then the moon exploded. Why aren’t you laughing?”), nor good gaming (“My rocket-launcher defeats your paper, your stone and your scissors”), nor good storytelling (“The killer was this guy that had never appeared, and you could have never guessed at, and which were were never clued about”).
Sure, it would be dull if everyone predicted everything everyone else did; but that’s different to being capable of being predicted in the theoretical/philosophical sense that was being discussed—in the sense of existing inside a deterministic universe, and that we theoretically could predict other people’s behaviours.
What I am struggling with here is an intuition that the whole idea of unpredictability in “the theoretical/philosophical sense” is a bad, ill-formed idea. I know roughly what it means to have predictability as a two-place predicate. P(E, A) means that person A (a person equipped with the theory and empirical information that A has) is capable of predicting event E. Fine. But now how do we turn that into a one-place predicate. Do we define:
P1(E) == Forall persons A . P(E,A)
or is it
P1(E) == Forall physically possible persons A . P(E,A)
or is it
P1(E) == For some hypothetical omniscient person A . P(E,A)
or is it something more complicated, involving light cones and levels of knowledge that are still supernatural.
The thing is, even if you are able to come up with a precise definition, my intuition makes me doubt that anything so contrived could be of any possible use in a philosophical enquiry.
Even when playing Paper, Stone, Scissors?
I think that when the word ‘unpredictable’ is used, it is important to specify: unpredictable by whom?
In “Paper, Stone, Scissors,” like in other contests and conflicts, (and same as in humour), you just need to be unpredicted, not really to be “unpredictable”. True complete unpredictability is neither good humour (“Two men walk into a bar, then the moon exploded. Why aren’t you laughing?”), nor good gaming (“My rocket-launcher defeats your paper, your stone and your scissors”), nor good storytelling (“The killer was this guy that had never appeared, and you could have never guessed at, and which were were never clued about”).
Sure, it would be dull if everyone predicted everything everyone else did; but that’s different to being capable of being predicted in the theoretical/philosophical sense that was being discussed—in the sense of existing inside a deterministic universe, and that we theoretically could predict other people’s behaviours.
A good analysis.
What I am struggling with here is an intuition that the whole idea of unpredictability in “the theoretical/philosophical sense” is a bad, ill-formed idea. I know roughly what it means to have predictability as a two-place predicate. P(E, A) means that person A (a person equipped with the theory and empirical information that A has) is capable of predicting event E. Fine. But now how do we turn that into a one-place predicate. Do we define:
P1(E) == Forall persons A . P(E,A)
or is it
P1(E) == Forall physically possible persons A . P(E,A)
or is it
P1(E) == For some hypothetical omniscient person A . P(E,A)
or is it something more complicated, involving light cones and levels of knowledge that are still supernatural.
The thing is, even if you are able to come up with a precise definition, my intuition makes me doubt that anything so contrived could be of any possible use in a philosophical enquiry.