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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 27, 2025

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Ok, as long as you're not challenging the actual correct result, I can relax and accept that, sure, there's some philosophical weirdness about the whole thing. Sleeping Beauty's consciousness ends up "splitting" into both Monday and Tuesday, which is not something we normally encounter. So you could imagine some philosophical argument that her "soul" is more likely to experience the "qualia" of Monday than of Tuesday (if, say, "souls" jump into random time slices of a fixed universe, and earlier ones are more likely than later ones), so when it "picks one" to "be", it's not evenly apportioned. To an outside observer (i.e. for all practical purposes), across repeated experiments her body still experiences twice as many tails as heads, but her "soul" might not.

Is that a fair representation of what you think is "weird"?

This has some application to various anthropic arguments (and if we ever start simulating human brains or worrying about AI welfare, this is going to be a HOT topic of debate). Indeed, "souls" floating around independently and "picking someone" to "be" in a fixed universe is also a requirement for the Doomsday Argument to work. But personally I just think there's no disconnect between observers and physical bodies/brains (and everything I put in quotes above is nonsense). It's not something that can be settled with evidence, though.

I meant that the argument quoted in my first comment is weird, for the reasons Ive outlined. This doesnt really say anything about the sleeping beauty disagreements, except by pointing to the difficulty of establishing probabilities for "its Monday" and "its Tuesday" without indifference.