I think this is the disconnect… The chooser’s mental state when sampled by Omega causes what goes into the box. The chooser’s subsequent decisions don’t cause what went into the box, so they don’t “control” what goes into the box either. Control is a causal term...
The goal is to get more money, not necessarily to “causally control” money. I agree that a popular sense of “control” probably doesn’t include what I described, but the question of whether that word should include a new sense is a debate about definitions, not about the thought experiment (the disambiguating term around here is “acausal control”, though in the normal situations it includes causal control as a special case).
So long as we understand that I refer to the fact that it’s logically valid that if you one-box, then you get $1,000,000, and if you two-box, then you get only $1,000, there is no need to be concerned with that term. Since it’s true that if you two-box, then you only get $1,000, then by two-boxing you guarantee that it’s true that you two-box, ergo that you get $1000. Correspondingly, if you one-box, that guarantees that it’s true that you get $1,000,000.
(The subtlety is hidden in the fact that it might be false that you one-box, in which case it’s also true that your one-boxing implies that 18 is a prime. But if you actually one-box, that’s not the case! See this post for some discussion of this subtlety and a model that makes the situation somewhat clearer.)
I think this is the disconnect… The chooser’s mental state when sampled by Omega causes what goes into the box. The chooser’s subsequent decisions don’t cause what went into the box, so they don’t “control” what goes into the box either. Control is a causal term...
The goal is to get more money, not necessarily to “causally control” money. I agree that a popular sense of “control” probably doesn’t include what I described, but the question of whether that word should include a new sense is a debate about definitions, not about the thought experiment (the disambiguating term around here is “acausal control”, though in the normal situations it includes causal control as a special case).
So long as we understand that I refer to the fact that it’s logically valid that if you one-box, then you get $1,000,000, and if you two-box, then you get only $1,000, there is no need to be concerned with that term. Since it’s true that if you two-box, then you only get $1,000, then by two-boxing you guarantee that it’s true that you two-box, ergo that you get $1000. Correspondingly, if you one-box, that guarantees that it’s true that you get $1,000,000.
(The subtlety is hidden in the fact that it might be false that you one-box, in which case it’s also true that your one-boxing implies that 18 is a prime. But if you actually one-box, that’s not the case! See this post for some discussion of this subtlety and a model that makes the situation somewhat clearer.)