And it brings up the point that while I've talked with many folks in different fields about time-travel thinking, I have never found a field where it's not useful to bend one's mind in this way. I've come to the conclusion that we have to shift the way we think about ourselves in time, so we can navigate more successfully as a species. I suppose that's obvious from the article.
Anyway, to address your question re: Prisoner's Dilemma equivalent within a time-travel paradigm -- isn't that what virtually every Dr. Who episode is really asking?
But more recently -- to my view the movie Arrival successfully solves a time-travel-inspired Prisoner's Dilemma by modeling the Present Amy Adams as capable of negotiating with her Past and Future selves (as the captors) and bringing actionable tactics into the Present. So she not only succeeds in being released from prison, she saves the world too.
So it's communication and collaboration with the captors (the non-Present versions of ourselves) that can turn them (us) into advocates.
Meanwhile, the other prisoners are the aliens, who have access to the same strategy over time (and use it to teach Amy Adams' character). There can't be any clear communication between them, but they can circumvent this by connecting in the future and being aware of that connection in the Past/Present.
So it's a brilliant solution to the prisoner's dilemma -- just because you can't communicate in the present doesn't mean that after you get released you can't share how you did it!
The interesting thing about the future, in general, is it's way less crowded than the past and present -- because the past and present are where most people think you have to do things to get them done.
That's correct. In fact, I give the code in the paper.
FYI -- the same effect has recently been replicated by a Berkeley physicist using a totally independent random number generator. But I understand the concern here; that's why I asked him to try to replicate it using better equipment.
As to the concern about it being Arduino-based -- it's easy to criticize experiments because they don't use sophisticated equipment. However, what actually matters is if you can find an explanation for why the student-level equipment would result in the artifact(s) you suspect are there. That's more difficult to do, and in fact no one has been able to do it yet.
We will see how this shakes down, but I've been doing the experiment continously for two years and the effect is robust.
Thanks to everyone for reading the article. The argument is good to read. It's a delight to me that people are thinking about these issues, since as should be clear from the article, I think they are important to think about.
And, of course, I certainly don't have all the right answers. But science isn't about that -- it's about allowing yourself to be brave enough to find questions that you are curious to answer (even if no one else is) -- and rigorously trying to discover the answers. Or at least, further questions.
And it brings up the point that while I've talked with many folks in different fields about time-travel thinking, I have never found a field where it's not useful to bend one's mind in this way. I've come to the conclusion that we have to shift the way we think about ourselves in time, so we can navigate more successfully as a species. I suppose that's obvious from the article.
Anyway, to address your question re: Prisoner's Dilemma equivalent within a time-travel paradigm -- isn't that what virtually every Dr. Who episode is really asking?
But more recently -- to my view the movie Arrival successfully solves a time-travel-inspired Prisoner's Dilemma by modeling the Present Amy Adams as capable of negotiating with her Past and Future selves (as the captors) and bringing actionable tactics into the Present. So she not only succeeds in being released from prison, she saves the world too.
So it's communication and collaboration with the captors (the non-Present versions of ourselves) that can turn them (us) into advocates.
Meanwhile, the other prisoners are the aliens, who have access to the same strategy over time (and use it to teach Amy Adams' character). There can't be any clear communication between them, but they can circumvent this by connecting in the future and being aware of that connection in the Past/Present.
So it's a brilliant solution to the prisoner's dilemma -- just because you can't communicate in the present doesn't mean that after you get released you can't share how you did it!
The interesting thing about the future, in general, is it's way less crowded than the past and present -- because the past and present are where most people think you have to do things to get them done.