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Newcomb's Paradox has useful and surprising philosophic applications. First, let us consider how Newcomb's Paradox can be used to change the past. Here we are talking only of a single spacetime, which is the usual approximation to the much more complex quantum reality. Study David Deutsch's Fabric of Reality to investigate the relationships between spacetimes and the greater multiverse. Change the past? Well, not exactly. What Newcomb's Paradox allows you to do is to choose which past really happened in your spacetime. But it will seem to you that you have changed the past---you certainly will have effected (or determined) it from your point of view! The supervising entity, sometimes called "God", "Extremely Advanced Alien Intelligence", or "the Oracle", etc., will be called OS here (short for Operating System). It is this OS, of course, that presents the notorious choice of Box A --or-- Box A and Box B. Now you will determine whether the OS awakened and tortured you the night before last, or not. Let choosing Box A indicate your choice that you slumbered undisturbed, and choosing AB indicate your choice that you were awakened and tortured (under the influence of midazolam, or something like it, of course). Now let us describe what really happened two days ago during the night. If the OS believes that you two days from now will choose just box A, it does not disturb you. If the OS believes that in two days you will take both boxes, then you get zapped. In nearly deterministic spacetimes, of course, you cannot change what really happened. But from your perspective, you can in these contrived situations actually determine what will turn out to have happened. In the same way, Newcomb's Paradox can be used to falsify any memory that you have. Just make the appropriate choice, and the memory will turn out to have been artificially induced. Make the other choice, and it will turn out to have been genuine. For authorization of truth, please depend on persons and historical records that by hypothesis and by general understanding are not to be involved in the experiments. Yes, in some bizarre and unuseful thought experiments, even your memories of such unimpeachable sources can be affected, but we restrict ourselves, in all the philosophically useful experiments that I know of, to single-run applications of. Newcomb's Paradox END |