On Mon, Sep 7, 2015 at 12:05 PM, Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > On 9/7/2015 3:23 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > > On 06 Sep 2015, at 22:27, Jason Resch wrote: > > You will undergo the following experiment: > > 1. During the weekend you will be put to sleep with a drug and not be > woken up until Monday. > 2. On monday you will be woken up and asked what day it is. *How do you > answer?* > 3. You are then given a drug to put you to sleep again and also given a > drug that induces amnesia of being woken up at all on Monday. > 4. You are woken up on Tuesday, and asked what day it is. *How do you > answer?* > > *If asked to ascribe a probability to it being Monday when you are woken > up, how do you answer on either of the days you are awoken?* > > (I am particularly interested in John Clark's answer to the final question) > > > I guess that the experiencer know the entire protocol, in this case, > without further reading, I would say it is equivalent with a > self-duplication. Nice thought experiment as it does not involve > self-duplication and illustrates also a probability in a deterministic > context. Not quite feasible, though, as it involves a perfect one day > amnesia, but it illustrates well the point. > > And now reading further I see that we agree. > > To Brent, I would add that we can use the frequentist probability > analysis, as that experience *can* be repeated, and if you asked me the > probability to have been woke up n times on Tuesday, (n less than 52, the > number of week in one year) when the experience is repeated every week > during one year, I would use the Gaussian distribution, or the Pascal > triangle, I mean the Newton binomial (as 52 weeks is not very high to use > Gauss function, perhaps). > > > If each time you woke up, you guessed the day and then someone told you > the correct day and you wrote it down (since otherwise you'd never remember > anything to use as statistics) then you'd be right about half the time and > you proportion correct would have a binomial distribution. BUT suppose you > just said "Monday" every time. Then you would right exactly half the > time, with no scatter; thus showing that there's no randomness. > But does probability require fundamental randomness or merely uncertainty? Can we not play a game of poker while using psudeo-random number generators to shuffle the deck (so long as the seed remains unknown to us)? Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
