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by espadrine 4215 days ago
To me, there are two more issues with that demon paradox.

First, that it is assumed that its answer has a physical representation in reality. The fact that solving a non-trivial maze from the inside is impossible without moving through the maze doesn't mean the maze cannot be solved without moving. It can be solved from above the maze. Similarly, assuming quantum mechanics is accurate in that every particle has a random nudge in its position and velocity, if we had access to the random generator, we could create that demon; otherwise, the solution would be expressed in terms of what that generator produces: a solution which doesn't have a physical representation, but is merely a probability distribution.

Second, there is this assumption that its answer be crystal clear for us to understand. Any amount of work with symbolic computation gives the intuition that sometimes, the answer isn't atomic. In that case, the demon's answer could be "if I say that you listen to the radio, what you will do is watch TV. Otherwise, you will listen to the radio".