Paper assignment,* which requires a lengthy exposition of the set-up for Newcomb's problem; segue via Descartes and an exposition of the difference between romanticism and Cartesian skepticism, with Kant as a pivot, to Shelley's Mont Blanc. A word more about that difference: Descartes was trying to prove that it wasn't all in the mind; the Romantics were trying to prove that it more ore less was. But they are similar (via Kant) in believing that the external world was empirical trash, that this gave them access to...
Paper assignment,* which requires a lengthy exposition of the set-up for Newcomb's problem; segue via Descartes and an exposition of the difference between romanticism and Cartesian skepticism, with Kant as a pivot, to Shelley's
Mont Blanc. A word more about that difference: Descartes was trying to prove that it wasn't all in the mind; the Romantics were trying to prove that it more ore less was. But they are similar (via Kant) in believing that the external world was empirical trash, that this gave them access to, or at least desire for, a supersensible externality: magnitude itself (say) and not the pseudo-magnitude of the empirical world. End of Shelley's
Mont Blanc.
*Here is the paper assignment as posted to the class site:
If you weren't in class yesterday, you'll probably want to listen to the podcast, where we discussed the second paper topic at some length.
This is the short version:
An extremely acute reader of human character gives you a box whose contents are either $1,000,000 or nothing. She also offers you $10,000, which you are free to take or leave. If she thinks you'll take the $10,000, she won't have put anything in the box she's given you; when you open it it will be empty. If she thinks you won't take it, but will be satisfied with the mystery-box, she'll have put $1,000,000 in it, which you will find when you open it. But you can't open the box until you either take or reject the $10,000.
She's done this hundreds of thousands of times before, and has never been wrong in her predictions as to what people would do - take the $10,000 (everyone who did got nothing in the mystery box), or leave it (everyone who did got $1,000,000 in the mystery box). She can't see the future, though, and she has no magical powers to decide what will be in the box after you make your choice. She's put something in the box, or hasn't, depending only on her ability to dope out your character or personality, to figure out what you will do in the situation in question. What will you do and why?
Make your answer vivid; make the argument one about what you would do and why, not necessarily what you think a perfectly rational agent would do. Write it, if you like, as a short story, or in whatever way you can make your own thinking most compelling, most about how you would think this out if it were really happening. (After all, she's predicted what you would do when it really happens.)
You can, and should, think about using any of the ideas we've covered this semester: I could see a way in which practically any of them could be relevant.
Don't do any outside reading on this problem. Don't talk to your friends about it, don't look it up on Wikipedia (as some of you did for the Pascal paper). Think this through in your own way.
