This is a really nice post about something called the 'sleeping beauty problem' in philosophy. It poses two intuitively strong but different calculations of probability, and in so doing identifies some key issues:
- indexicals - linguistic expressions whose reference can shift from context to context
- auto-epistemology - the study of how future and past belief states affect present belief states
- memory and forgetting - whether we once knew something says anything about what we believe now
Yes, these are pretty abstract. The sleeping beauty problem makes them concrete, so we can genuinely see the issues in a concrete way. "It plays an important role everywhere in everyday life. We continuously fight not only to improve our epistemic situation, but also to avoid worsenings. We fight forgetting on a small scale everyday and on a large scale with expensive historical institutions; we fight against drugs, because they ruin ourselves and our epistemic perspective; and so forth." These are core issues in education.
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