|
You must take only Box A.
If you take both boxes, then it will simply turn out
that Box A is empty.
To stubbornly claim that your decision is uncorrelated with
other events in the multiverse shows that you don't yet regard yourself
as a physical mechanism. Face the fact that your decisions are
by necessity totally correlated with
many other events in spacetime.
True, as you gaze at the padlocked boxes, and note the
days-old layers of dust on them, you may be under the
illusion that the thought processes that finally obtain
in your own brain are totally independent of what has
happened elsewhere, and are totally independent of the
contents of the boxes. But they're not.
We have every rational
right to regard a single slice of spacetime as virtually
deterministic, and that your decision is completely consistent
with all physics within the solar system.
You may also erroneously think "I cannot change what's in the
boxes." This is just the wrong way to look at it. You don't
know what's in the boxes. While it is not a question of "changing"
anything, it is a question of causing (from your perspective)
the contents to be one thing or to be a different thing.
Admittedly, it is a bit weird to affect something formally in
the past, but the whole contrived situation is of course weird. Besides,
we must get used to much weirder things than this, as you
probably already know.
(It turns out to be a little easier, given the fact
of the existence of the multiverse, to explain why
this answer is correct.)
|