Sleeping Beauty
Edited by Joel Pust (University of Delaware)
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Summary | The Sleeping Beauty Problem concerns a perfectly rational agent who is put to sleep for two days. Depending on the toss of a fair coin, she is awakened once (Heads) or twice (Tails). However, after each waking, she is put back to sleep with a drug that erases her memories of the waking. The question which constitutes the problem is this: "When she is first awakened, what degree of belief will she have that the outcome of the coin toss is Heads?" The problem has proven exceedingly difficult to solve and attracts attention both for its intrinsic interest and because of the many connections between the correct answer to the problem and a wide variety of other philosophical topics including: the status of chance-credence and frequency-credence principles, the evidential relevance of essentially indexical information, the acceptability of conditionalization principles, the proper understanding of Dutch Book arguments, the status of indifference principles, and the proper interpretation of quantum mechanics. |
Key works | The problem was first raised in the philosophical literature by Elga 2000, who defended the 1/3 answer. Lewis 2001 responded, defending the 1/2 answer. Important early papers defending 1/3 include Arntzenius 2003, Dorr 2002, Horgan 2004, and Hitchcock 2004. Important early papers defending 1/2 include White 2006 and Meacham 2008. The literature has since exploded in size. |
Introductions | Elga 2000, Titelbaum 2013 |
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Related categories
Siblings:
- Doomsday Argument (110)
- Monty Hall Problem (30)
- New Riddle of Induction (245)
- Paradox of Confirmation (106)
- Probabilistic Puzzles, Misc (75)
- Fine-Tuning in Cosmology (268)
- Multiple Universes (37)
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