Just saw this thread lol. @MITer94 I am familiar with Newcomb’s problem. Are you familiar with the Bayesian resolution which posits that probability is relative? I think that best concurs with how probability is applied in science and the real world.
Let me rephrase it: suppose I shuffle a deck and peek at the top card - it’s the Queen of hearts. Now I ask you, who haven’t seen the deck, what the probability is that the top card is a spade? Of course you say 1/4. I ask you what the probability is that the top card is the Queen of hearts? You’d say it’s 1/52. But to me the first probability is 0 and the second is 1.
Who’s right? Well, we both are - given the information that we respectively have. That just reflects the fact that there is more information available to me than to you, and so the random variable that is the card has less entropy for me than for you. The most puritanical devotees of frequentism might call this “credence” rather than “true” probability, but personally I prefer this interpretation of probability since in the real world, unlike in this contrived example, we often have no way of “peeking at the cards” beforehand. Philosophically speaking, probabilities don’t just “exist” in the real world; we assess them given the information available to us in order to model the world. In fact, if you believe we live in a deterministic world (or at least macroscopically deterministic; let’s leave aside quantum effects) the probability of anything is 0 or 1.
Of course always answering “0 or 1 but I have no way to tell which” would make probability useless, since the whole point is to express how sure we are of something happening, which is necessarily related to how much information we have.