I see what you mean. I agree that we know more than just “the older child of the family is a boy”. The “more” would be the process of how I come to know it. To me what’s special about the island problem is that when trying to express what I know into a simply statement such as “the older child is a boy” any information about the process is lost. Therefore it left us with an ambiguity about the process thats up to interpretation. This is exactly what happens in the Boy or Girl paradox as well. If there is any lesson then it should be conditioning on a statement such as “someone with all those detailed perception and memory exists” is a rather delicate matter. Is this someone specified first and then all the details about her explored? Or is all these details spelled out first and someone with these details was found to be exist? SSA and SIA would give different answers from a third-person perspective. But from first-person perspective the process is clear. It is the former. That someone is specified based on immediacy to perception, i.e. that someone is this one. And then all the details about me are found out though my experience. Therefore the perspective consistency argument would not change its answer basing on any details observed after waking up.
As for the disagreement, more preciously the “agree to disagree”, between friends while in communication. I’m aware it is a rather peculiar case. SIA and FNC would not result in that which can certainly be used as a argument favouring them. But in my opinion it can be quite simply explained by perspective differences. Of course basing on my experience with paradoxes relating to anthropic reasoning, nothing is simple. So I understand if others find it hard to accept.
What I mean by “someone with those memories exists” is just that there exists a being who has those memories, not that I in particular have those memories. That’s the “non-indexical” part of FNC. Of course, in ordinary life, as ordinarily thought of, there’s no real difference, since no one but me has those memories.
I agree that one could imagine conditioning on the additional piece of “information” that it’s me that has those memories, if one can actually make sense of what that means. But one of the points of my FNC paper is that this additional step is not necessary for any ordinary reasoning task, so to say it’s necessary for something like evaluating cosmological theories is rather speculative. (In contrast, some people seem to think that SSA is just a simple extension of the need to account for sampling bias when reasoning about ordinary situations, which I think is not correct.)
I see what you mean. I agree that we know more than just “the older child of the family is a boy”. The “more” would be the process of how I come to know it. To me what’s special about the island problem is that when trying to express what I know into a simply statement such as “the older child is a boy” any information about the process is lost. Therefore it left us with an ambiguity about the process thats up to interpretation. This is exactly what happens in the Boy or Girl paradox as well. If there is any lesson then it should be conditioning on a statement such as “someone with all those detailed perception and memory exists” is a rather delicate matter. Is this someone specified first and then all the details about her explored? Or is all these details spelled out first and someone with these details was found to be exist? SSA and SIA would give different answers from a third-person perspective. But from first-person perspective the process is clear. It is the former. That someone is specified based on immediacy to perception, i.e. that someone is this one. And then all the details about me are found out though my experience. Therefore the perspective consistency argument would not change its answer basing on any details observed after waking up.
As for the disagreement, more preciously the “agree to disagree”, between friends while in communication. I’m aware it is a rather peculiar case. SIA and FNC would not result in that which can certainly be used as a argument favouring them. But in my opinion it can be quite simply explained by perspective differences. Of course basing on my experience with paradoxes relating to anthropic reasoning, nothing is simple. So I understand if others find it hard to accept.
What I mean by “someone with those memories exists” is just that there exists a being who has those memories, not that I in particular have those memories. That’s the “non-indexical” part of FNC. Of course, in ordinary life, as ordinarily thought of, there’s no real difference, since no one but me has those memories.
I agree that one could imagine conditioning on the additional piece of “information” that it’s me that has those memories, if one can actually make sense of what that means. But one of the points of my FNC paper is that this additional step is not necessary for any ordinary reasoning task, so to say it’s necessary for something like evaluating cosmological theories is rather speculative. (In contrast, some people seem to think that SSA is just a simple extension of the need to account for sampling bias when reasoning about ordinary situations, which I think is not correct.)