What we have here is an inability to recognize that causality no longer flows only from ‘past’ to ‘future’.
If we’re given a box that could contain $1,000 or nothing, we calculate the expected value of the superposition of these two possibilities. We don’t actually expect that there’s a superposition within the box—we simply adopt a technique to help compensate for what we do not know. From our ignorant perspective, either case could be real, although in actuality either the box has the money or it does not.
This is similar. The amount of money in the box depends on what choice we make. The fact that the placement of money into the box happened in the past is irrelevant, because we’ve already presumed that the relevant cause-and-effect relationship works backwards in time.
Eliezer states that the past is fixed. Well, it may be fixed in some absolute sense (although that is a complicated topic), but from our ignorant perspective we have to consider what appears to us to be the possible alternatives. That means that we must consider the money in the boxes to be uncertain. Choosing causes Omega to put a particular amount of money in the box. That this happened in the past is irrelevant, because the causal dependence points into the past instead of the future.
Even if we ignore actual time travel, we must consider the amount of money present to be uncertain until we choose, which then determines how much is there—in the sense of our technique, from our limited perspective.
If we accept that Omega is really as accurate as it appears to be—which is not a small thing to accept, certainly—and we want to maximize money, then the correct choice is B.
What we have here is an inability to recognize that causality no longer flows only from ‘past’ to ‘future’.
If we’re given a box that could contain $1,000 or nothing, we calculate the expected value of the superposition of these two possibilities. We don’t actually expect that there’s a superposition within the box—we simply adopt a technique to help compensate for what we do not know. From our ignorant perspective, either case could be real, although in actuality either the box has the money or it does not.
This is similar. The amount of money in the box depends on what choice we make. The fact that the placement of money into the box happened in the past is irrelevant, because we’ve already presumed that the relevant cause-and-effect relationship works backwards in time.
Eliezer states that the past is fixed. Well, it may be fixed in some absolute sense (although that is a complicated topic), but from our ignorant perspective we have to consider what appears to us to be the possible alternatives. That means that we must consider the money in the boxes to be uncertain. Choosing causes Omega to put a particular amount of money in the box. That this happened in the past is irrelevant, because the causal dependence points into the past instead of the future.
Even if we ignore actual time travel, we must consider the amount of money present to be uncertain until we choose, which then determines how much is there—in the sense of our technique, from our limited perspective.
If we accept that Omega is really as accurate as it appears to be—which is not a small thing to accept, certainly—and we want to maximize money, then the correct choice is B.