In saying, last week: “When two people hug them, and since each hug to the other, is it a hug or two?”, He did not intend to raise a philosophical digression (although welcome is: after all, as Pythagoras and Plato, philosophy and mathematics are already understood, are sisters who go hand in hand); But, as Juan Toledo points out: “Actually, a metaphysical problem is being raised in which the false identification of consciousness that we are with a particular body comes into play.” If that identification is false or not, or to what extent it is misleading, it is an issue that has been worrying to philosophers, both from the East and the West, since time immemorial, and we are not going to enter it; But it is a good pretext to remember other logical riddles with evenings – or not so veiled – philosophical implications. The most famous Newcompel paradox this type of this type is, probably, the known as Newcomb paradox: an almost infallible oracle puts on the table two boxes, an open in which there are 1,000 euros and another closed, and tells you: “You can take the two boxes or only the boxes. I have planned that you are going to take both boxes, I will not have put anything in the closed box, while if I have planned that you will only take the closed box, I will have put in it one million euros. ”Be You will get a thousand euros, since the closed box will be empty. But, on the other hand, the boxes are already on the table, and the closed box already contains the million or does not contain it, regardless of what you decide, so it would be absurd He published it in its mathematical games section of Scientific American magazine. Since then the Newcomb paradox has given much to talk and have raised numerous variants and collateral reflections. Science fiction has been raising equivalent paradoxes for a long time in time travel stories, studied by Russian astrophysicist igor nóvikov (which formulated the “principle of consistency” that bears his name; but that is another article); But, for some reason, the Newcomb formulation caused a special stir. The most curious thing in the case is that, as Nozick pointed out and subsequently found Gardner as a result of the numerous and passionate comments of their readers, approximately half of the people to whom the issue is considered clear that you have to take the two boxes, and the other half seems equally obvious that you have to take only the box. Two antagonistic positions defended with equal fervor by people convinced that those of the other side would break down: something very common in the field of politics, but unusual in that of logic. This is what we could call the “Newcomb Metaparadox”: the paradoxical psychological impact of the paradox itself. For the same way, what would be your choice? Rise and death a professor of philosophy told their students the following story, based, based, according to him, on real events: a man is sleeping on a sofa next to his wife, who is weaving. The man has a nightmare: he dreams that he is wrapped in a fierce battle and will cut his neck with a saber. The woman, seeing him agitated, passes the tricotar needle through the neck to wake him up and the man dies of scare. Is this story plausible? (Tagstotranslate) Science
