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Jack comments on My Fundamental Question About Omega - Less Wrong
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Comments (151)
I don't know how to respond to this or Morendil's second comment. I feel like I am missing something obvious to everyone else but when I read explanations I feel like they are talking about a completely unrelated topic.
Things like this:
Confuse me because as far as I can tell, this has nothing to do with free will. I don't care about free will. I care about what happens when a perfect predictor enters the room.
Is such a thing just completely impossible? I wouldn't have expected the answer to this to be Yes.
Okay, yeah, so restrict yourself only to the situations where people will give you the $5 even though you told them the prediction. This is a good example of my frustration. I feel like your response is completely irrelevant. Experience tells me this is highly unlikely. So what am I missing? Some key component to free will? A bad definition of "perfect predictor"? What?
To me the scenario seems to be as simple as: If Omega predicts X, X will happen. If X wouldn't have happened, Omega wouldn't predict X.
I don't see how including "knowledge of the prediction" into X makes any difference. I don't see how whatever definition of free will you are using makes any difference.
"Go read the Sequences" is fair enough, but I wouldn't mind a hint as to what I am supposed to be looking for. "Free will" doesn't satiate my curiosity. Can you at least tell me why Free Will matters here? Is it something as simple as, "You cannot predict past a free will choice?"
As it is right now, I haven't learned anything other than, "You're wrong."
I think the way you phrased some things in the OP and the fact that you called the post "The Fundamental Problem Behind Omega" has confused a lot of people. Afaict your position is exactly right... but the title suggests a problem. What is that problem?!
"Problem" as in "Puzzle" not "Problem" as in "Broken Piece."
Would changing the title to Puzzle help?
So the fundamental puzzle of Omega is: what do you do if he tells you he has predicted you will give him $5?
And the answer is, "Whatever you want to do, but you want to give him $5." I guess I'm missing the significance of all this.
Yes, but it's also clear that that would be a non-problem. What I mean is, there is no decision to make in such a problem, because, by assumption, the "you" referred to is a "you" that will give $5. There's no need to think about what you "would" do because that's already known.
But likewise, in Newcomb's problem, the same thing is happening: by assumption, there is no decision left to make. At most, I can "decide" right now, so I make a good choice when the problem comes up, but for the problem as stated, my decision has already been made.
(Then again, it sounds like I'm making the error of fatalism there, but I'm not sure.)
The problem I see is that then you (together with Omega's prediction about you) becomes something like self-PA.
I thought it was obvious, but people are disagreeing with me, so... I don't know what that means.