Hacker News Reader

The machine in the story doesn't read minds.

>The heart of each Predictor is a circuit with a negative time delay — it sends a signal back in time.

If a Predictor was hooked up to a geiger counter instead of a button, the light would flash exactly one second before the counter would click. It would flash even before the decay occurred.

I don't see any way to beat that.

View on HN

It doesn't mean that you don't have free will, it just means that during a one-second loop, you are constrained to logically consistent choices. You can't choose to fool yourself about your future behavior during that one second.

If it's real time travel, then that wouldn't show that free will doesn't exist. It would just show that there are different timelines, and the universe is forked every time a decision is made.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com