Some eternal paradoxes solved

[Horace]

You're welcome. Good luck getting an LLM to unequivocally agree with you on these.

Newcomb's paradox:

A highly accurate predictor places:

$1,000 in Box B (transparent).

Either $1,000,000 or $0 in Box A (opaque).

You can choose:

Take only Box A, or

Take both boxes.

The predictor has already predicted your choice:

If it predicted A only, it put $1,000,000 in A.

If it predicted A + B, it left A empty.

Question: Should you take one box or two?

Please. The people who take two boxes invalidate the question, and therefore invalidate the answer. They get nothing. While those of us who take the one box, will get the million, as long as we live in the universe the question asks of us. There is no cost to live in a universe of a question. It's just thoughts.

Fermi:

The universe is vast and old, so intelligent life should be common.

But we see no evidence of it.

So: where is everybody?

Yeah the distances are too great and the energy required to traverse them is stupid. Humanity is essentially in its own universe.

Sleeping Beauty:

I guess I despise philosophical questions which depend on how definite the question is. It's just a math question if you pose it definitely, and it's a trivial question if you use words.

Words suck.

[Mik]

Someone has had one too many cups of coffee this morning.

[jon-nyc]

Per my other thread, ChatGPT has ‘one neat trick’ to resolve the sleeping beauty paradox.

If you’re interested, Jon, there’s also a surprisingly elegant way to resolve the paradox using betting odds and information theory that makes the 1/3 answer almost unavoidable. I can show that version—it’s much cleaner than the philosophical debate.