This week I participated in this thread on Newcomb's Paraodox which was noted on BoingBoing.

The paradox:

A highly superior being from another part of the galaxy presents you with two boxes, one open and one closed. In the open box there is a thousand-dollar bill. In the closed box there is either one million dollars or there is nothing. You are to choose between taking both boxes or taking the closed box only. But there's a catch.

The being claims that he is able to predict what any human being will decide to do. If he predicted you would take only the closed box, then he placed a million dollars in it. But if he predicted you would take both boxes, he left the closed box empty. Furthermore, he has run this experiment with 999 people before, and has been right every time.

What do you do?

A short version of my answer: The parodox confuses people because it stipulates you are a highly predictable being to the alien, then asks you to make a choice. But in fact you don't make a choice, you are a choice. Your choice derives from who you are, not the logic you go through before the alien. The alien's power dictates you already either are or aren't the sort of person who picks one box or two, and in fact the alien is the one who made the choice based on that -- you just imagine you could do differently than predicted.

Those who argue that since the money is already in the boxes, you should always take both miss the point of the paradox. That view is logically correct, but those who hold that view will not become millionaires, and this was set by the fact they hold the view. It isn't that there's no way the contents of the boxes can change because of your choice, it's that there isn't a million there if you're going to think that way.

Of course people don't like that premise of predictability and thus, as you will see in the thread, get very involved in the problem.

In thinking about this, it came to me that the alien is not so hypothetical. As you may know from reading this blog, I was once administered Versed, a sedative that also blocks your ability to form long term memories. I remember the injection, but not the things I said and did afterwards.

In my experiment we recruit subjects to test the paradox. They come in and an IV drip is installed, though they are not told about Versed. (Some people are not completely affected by Versed but assume our subjects are.) We ask subjects to give a deliberated answer, not to just try to be random, flip a coin or whatever.

So we administer the drug and present the problem, and see what you do. The boxes are both empty -- you won't remember that we cheated you. We do it a few times if necessary to see how consistent you are. I expect that most people would be highly consistent, but I think it would be a very interesting thing to research! If a few are not consistent, I suspect they may be deliberately being random, but again it would be interesting to find out why.

We videotape the final session, where there is money in the boxes. (Probably not a million, we can't quite afford that.) Hypothetically, it would be even better to find another drug that has the same sedative effects of Versed so you can't tell it apart and don't reason differently under it, but which allows you to remember the final session -- the one where, I suspect, we almost invariably get it right.

Each time you do it, however, you think you're doing it for the first time. However, at first you probably (and correctly) won't want to believe in our amazing predictive powers. There is no such alien, after all. That's where it becomes important to videotape the last session or even better, have a way to let you remember it. Then we can have auditors you trust completely audit the experimenter's remarkable accuracy (on the final round.) We don't really have to lie to the auditors, they can know how we do it. We just need a way for them to swear truthfully that on the final round, we are very, very accurate, without conveying to the subject that there are early, unremembered rounds where we are not accurate. Alas, we can't do that for the initial subjects -- another reason we can't put a million in.

Still, I suspect that most people would be fairly predictable and that many would find this extremely disturbing. We don't like determinism in any form. Certainly there are many choices that we imagine as choices but which are very predictable. Unless you are bi, you might imagine you are choosing the sex of your sexual partners -- that you could, if it were important, choose differently -- but in fact you always choose the same.

What I think is that having your choices be inherent in your makeup is not necessarily a contradiction to the concept of free will. You have a will, and you are free to exercise it, but in many cases that will is more a statement about who you are than what you're thinking at the time. The will was exercised in the past, in making you the sort of mind you are. It's still your will, your choices. In the same way I think that entirely deterministic computers can also make choices and have free will. Yes, their choices are entirely the result of their makeup. But if they rate being an "actor" then the choices are theirs, even if the makeup's initial conditions came from a creator. We are created by our parents and environment (and some think by a deity) but that's just the initial conditions. Quickly we become something unto ourselves, even if there is only one way we could have done that. We are not un-free, we just are what we are.