On 4 August 2016 at 09:09, smitra <[email protected]> wrote: > On 04-08-2016 00:12, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > >> Only if you wake up and find out winning the lottery was a mistake, >> which seems less likely than waking up a winner. Waking up as one of >> the many copies who didn't win is not one of the options - those >> copies are not continuations of the you who won the lottery. >> > > I'm imagining waking up after a night of heavy drinking with memories > gradually returning. Now, you can, of course, condition everything on the > person who will find that he won the lottery. But making that a hard part > of my identity doesn't make sense to me, otherwise you could not be the > same person and forget about it, or consider being the same person who > participated in the lottery who then went on to win it. >
You did start your post, "suppose that you won the lottery...". That constitutes a strong condition. A lot more people dream that they win the lottery than actually win the lottery, but usually if you are not dreaming then you can be sure that you are not dreaming, and I assume this is the sort of experience of winning the lottery that you mean. To have such an experience then wake up and realise that you were wrong seems unlikely. If you picked another example, such as realising that you are God, I would agree that you will more likely wake up at some point and realise that it is a dream or delusion. > Now,while this boils down to an arbitrary definition of personal identity, > we should be consistent about this; you can be the same person as the won > who had not yet won it, and you could imagine being a person who did not > win it, then you'll likely end up waking up as a copy in another branch who > did not win it. > For this thought experiment to be meaningful you would have to wake up as someone with a clear recollection of winning and yet not have won. If you wake up as someone who never won and never thought he had won then that is just a statement of what normally happens - people rarely win the lottery. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
