I didn’t read the entirety of your post because it reduces to the above.
It doesn’t matter what he is tracking. What matters is, has he already tracked it, or not? And if he has tracked it, then I must ask: in what direction does causality flow?
You may say that, in a way, it kind of flows both ways. You may say that future and past states are entangled in a mutually causative way, which is a form of retrocausality. I would say that determinism is necessarily a view of causality as flowing in both directions of time.
Because determinism reduces causality to logic, and logical biconditional implications go both ways. So, if you believe in a perfect predictor and thus determinism, and/or you believe in bi-directional causality with predictors whose past states are entangled with your present/future actions, then yes, of course, one-boxing is right.
But I don’t have that view of causality. I believe in indeterminism, and I believe in the strict unidirectionality of causality. I think this is true, and therefore rational and typically beneficial to believe. In V1 of the Newcomb Game, this happens to be a losing belief in Phase 1. In Phase 2 however, it is a winning belief.
I believe causality runs one way. Therefore, I believe the following things:
- Applying CDT is always best.
- Believing in CDT is usually best.
The case when believing in CDT is not best is when that belief is itself punished, unbeknownst to the believer. This is what is happening in Version 1 of the Newcomb Game. In Version 2, believing in CDT is still punished, but not as harshly. As a believer in CDT in V2, my punishment is that I need to do extra work, to set up a contract that allows me to one-box in a way that is logically consistent with my beliefs. There is no way for me to reliably one-box non-consistently with my beliefs, because my beliefs to a great degree determines my actions.
Note that the application of CDT is always beneficial in this framework. Even when I find a way to one-box in V2 of the game, I am still applying CDT. And the extra cost I incur due to this is not due to my application of CDT, but rather my belief in it. The predictor punishes me for my belief in, not my application of, CDT. Or well, this is the view that follows from the unidirectionality of causality. Drop that that view of unidirectionality, and the boundaries between Phase 1 and Phase 2 become blurry.
@Sime I am tagging you here because you seem to be suggesting the same thing. If you depart from the unidirectionalty of causality, then one-boxing is right. And I actually respect that position far more than the position of believing in the unidirectionality of causality, and yet nonetheless subscribing to one-boxing. The former position is an esoteric one requiring extraordinary evidence. The latter is, however, simply incoherent and illogical. Irrational, in fact.