Alternatively: The subject is show the result of the coin flip. A short time later, if the coin is heads, her memory is modified such that she remembers having seen tails.
Memory erasure can produce this sort of effect in a lot of situations. This is just a special case of that (I assume the false memory of a gentle waking also overwrites the true memory of the abrupt waking).
I deliberately wrote it so that there is no memory trickery or any other mental modification happening at all in the case where Sleeping Beauty updates from “definitely heads” to “hmm, could be tails”.
The bizarreness here is that all that is required is being aware of some probability that someone else, even in a counterfactual universe that she knows hasn’t happened, could come to share her future mental state without having her current mental state.
Yes, in the tails case memories that Sleeping Beauty might have between sleep and full wakefulness are removed, if the process allows her to have formed any. I was just implicitly assuming that ordinary memory formation would be suppressed during the (short) memory creation process.
Alternatively: The subject is show the result of the coin flip. A short time later, if the coin is heads, her memory is modified such that she remembers having seen tails.
Memory erasure can produce this sort of effect in a lot of situations. This is just a special case of that (I assume the false memory of a gentle waking also overwrites the true memory of the abrupt waking).
I deliberately wrote it so that there is no memory trickery or any other mental modification happening at all in the case where Sleeping Beauty updates from “definitely heads” to “hmm, could be tails”.
The bizarreness here is that all that is required is being aware of some probability that someone else, even in a counterfactual universe that she knows hasn’t happened, could come to share her future mental state without having her current mental state.
Yes, in the tails case memories that Sleeping Beauty might have between sleep and full wakefulness are removed, if the process allows her to have formed any. I was just implicitly assuming that ordinary memory formation would be suppressed during the (short) memory creation process.