Omega offers you two boxes. One is empty and the other has one thousand dollars. He offers you a choice of taking just the empty box or both boxes. If you just take the empty box, he will put a million dollars in it. You decide that you can’t change the big bang, and given the big bang his choice of whether or not to put a million dollars in the box is certain, so you can’t influence his decision to put the money in the box. As such, you might as well take both boxes.
How can you have control over the future but not the past if the two are correlated?
Consider this altered form of the problem:
Omega offers you two boxes. One is empty and the other has one thousand dollars. He offers you a choice of taking just the empty box or both boxes. If you just take the empty box, he will put a million dollars in it. You decide that you can’t change the big bang, and given the big bang his choice of whether or not to put a million dollars in the box is certain, so you can’t influence his decision to put the money in the box. As such, you might as well take both boxes.
How can you have control over the future but not the past if the two are correlated?