Dealing with Paradoxes #1

A strange thought occurred to me during my chemical engineering class, and it has something to do with predicting - with certainty - one's own future, and solving the metaphorical Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle application problem.



Suppose you have a hypothetical machine that predicts the future and conveys the information to a person. We do not bother ourselves with how this machine works; only that it does. The inherent problem - and this is a rather notorious problem - is that the person, affected by the knowledge of what lay in store for him, will behave differently than if he hadn't seen the future; this would in turn produce a completely different future, contradicting what was previously predicted.

To illustrate, imagine a man who uses the Hypothetical Machine™. He sees that in the future he will be a poor man who didn't graduate college, who is jobless, who is miserable and a whole lot of other disagreeable circumstances. The knowledge of this leaves an impression[1] in his mind, altering his reactions to future stimuli. He would start studying more, be more hardworking, etc... And this would result in a future that contradicts the Hypothetical Machine™'s prediction.

But supposing the man uses the machine again for another prediction, Just To Make Sure. He'll see that because of his fear due to watching the first prediction, he works hard, studies more, etc... And eventually gets a nice job after graduating summa cum laude, gets married, and lives happily ever after. This in turn will leave another impression on the person's consciousness. He will feel contented with his own future knowing that he'll eventually end up having a good life. He will end up lazy, unmotivated, and revert back to the first situation where he doesn't graduated college, becomes jobless, ends up poor and miserable, etc... of course, with some minor differences.

So we reach an impasse. How do you make it so that one can predict with certainty the future of a man, with the man knowing about that prediction, and still end up with a reliable prediction[2]?



But suppose you rerun that machine again and again, and suppose the rerunning doesn't affect the subject's psychological condition. (i.e. he doesn't get tired, frustrated, or crazed by watching different versions of his life again and again) As the number of reruns approaches infinity, there should be some sort of equilibrium achieved. That is, a future that, upon observation by the subject, perpetuates itself.

You have a solution that resembles something like the Nash equilibrium. Everyone's happy. The person ends up observing a future that he is satisfied with, and at the same time, is brought about by that feeling of satisfaction and the mindset created by the act of observation.



Of course, with infinity, the whole thing is a moot point, because with the intention of watching it an infinite times, it'll end up predicting that, by 20 or 30 years, the subject will still be watching reruns. So for the sake of practicality, we assume that watching the predictions take only a short amount of time, and that "infinity" isn't really infinity, but a number large enough to reach very near the equilibrium point, and predicting the future not with certainty, but rather, near-certainty.

Or with a ±0.01 deviation or something.



[1] I'm aware that people have different reactions to different stimuli, but for the sake of argument, shut up.

[2] Something like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which says something like the act of observing the location or momentum of a particle... makes the location or momentum of the particle uncertain. (i.e. given that you use a photon to observe the location of the particle, it must follow that the photon used to observe collides with the particle, moving it away, which results in another uncertain location, as well as general frustration.)