Early last year I offered a thought experiment involving a demon and a lotto jackpot. What if, I asked, on your way to play your lotto numbers, a demon appeared to you claiming he knows the numbers you were going to play? What if he handed you an envelope with the numbers he claimed you were going to play? What would you do? Would you check the envelope? Would you change your numbers?
The thought experiment was regarding free will. What is the content of free will, it invited us to think, if a demon can have knowledge of our choices even before we have actually made them ourselves? I concluded by saying that the mere existence of a prediction regarding a future choice would affect the phenomenon under observation in a way that would render the prediction irrelevant.
But was this all?
