I'm just going to answer in terms of (what I understand of) Metzinger's approach, since it is amenable to me and is materialist while taking phenomenal selfhood seriously.

It would be a cluster concept if none of those 'types of conscious states' had one essential defining feature. But they do. They're all phenomenally conscious in the sense that there's something it is like to be in them. — bert1

To my knowledge, Metzinger disagrees with the inference you just made. Specifically he claims that there can be "core components" of phenomenal selfhood and phenomenal experience which are universally shared, but nevertheless the concept is a cluster concept. That universal aspect of phenomenal selfhood he calls "minimal phenomenal selfhood", and the universal aspect of experience is "minimal phenomenal experience".

With those terms in place, I think he also strongly disagrees with the claim that "minimal phenomenal selfhood" and "minimal phenomenal experience" contain anything like what qualists intend by "what is it like" states.

That said, if one of them doesn't have the the feature of phenomenal consciousness (say, a robot (or zombie or whatever) creating a model of the world it can use to make predictions 'in the dark'), then it's not a conscious state in that sense. Phenomenal consciousness picks out exactly one feature/property and one feature only, the presence of which is essential to the definition. That sense of 'consciousness' isn't a cluster concept.

I believe there's a connotation in there, in contrasting phenomenal consciousness (in humans) to an absence of phenomenal consciousness (in robots), it construes consciousness as a binary property - on or off. Which might be true for Metzinger, but only for minimal phenomenal experience/selfhood - if someone is said to have experience or selfhood at all, they will have minimal phenomenal experience/selfhood (definitionally). The content and structure of such a state is left unanalysed (so far in this thread at least) save for the assertion that it consists of "what is it like" states, or even a general impression of "what is it like" over state-aggregates in a unified phenomenal experience (to be disambiguated).

The "rub" of making these distinctions is that what a qualist may construe as a definitive of phenomenal experience/selfhood may turn out to be too much - in that it contains unnecessary structures or types of content. How "what is it like" relevant states are construed by intersect with that non-necessary content. Those structures of experience that come with qualia that do not come with minimal phenomenal experiences.

Metzinger's account of minimal phenomenal experience (MPE) extracts 6 constraints that phenomenal experience must satisfy.

Wakefulness) The phenomenal character of tonic alertness (see section 3.1).


Low Complexity) often described as the complete absence of intentional content, in particular of high-level symbolic mental content (i.e., discursive, conceptual, or propositional thought), but also of sensorimotor or affective content

Self-luminosity): a phenomenal property instantiated during some MPE episodes, typically described as “radiance”, “brilliance”, or the “clear light” of primordial awareness.
Introspective availability) We can sometimes actively direct introspective attention to consciousness as such and we can distinguish possible states by the degree of actually ongoing access.

Epistemicity) The phenomenal experience of knowing, which comes in degrees and can also be described as the subjective quality of confidence

Transparency/Opacity) Like all other phenomenal representations, MPE can vary along a spectrum of opacity and transparency


Broadly construed, this is "awareness of awareness" without "awareness of the individuated content of awareness". In that state, the body's self-modelling processes which normally would intend, judge, see red apples, and be aware that "I" need to eat breakfast don't occur. Awareness without the cognitive retrojection of objects and a self identifying perspective subsuming them. That does not resemble anything like qualia, does it? There's little room for an embodied, self aware agent with mind states directed towards objects' properties in that construal. At least in the way qualists contend.

Which isn't to say the kind of states that qualists think of are impossible, just that those states perhaps aren't the essential characteristics of consciousness. Insofar as one can have phenomenal experience without anything resembling a quale (as often construed).

At the very least, I think Metzinger's efforts put the ball in qualists' courts for trying to show that those states are irreducible and primitive. In particular he suggests the following list that characterises "minimal phenomenal experience'

Paper here.

And if we're looking for evidence of such a thing - I think my list covers the bases. Though it isn't tailored to discriminate each facet individually.

I strongly disagree with this! Or at least, if this is true, we as philosophers of consciousness are fucked. Cluster-fucked you might say. It seems clear to me that consciousness is not a single cluster concept, but one word with several distinct meanings. A topic in itself perhaps and well worth a thread if someone can be arsed. — bert1

Interested in why you strongly disagree with consciousness being a cluster concept. There seem to be a lot of types of conscious states that have radically different qualities, but we'd call all of them conscious. That to me connotes approaching the idea as a fuzzy unity of overlapping things, which can be disambiguated as needed based on the context. In my mind that's a cluster concept.

Have you checked out any of Thomas Metzinger's work on classifying awarenesses (also @Wayfarer , you'd probably get something out of his "neuro-Buddhism")

I'd guess the following style of inference would work for it:

"What behaviours must an entity exhibit that renders consciousness the most plausible explanation for them?"

That's an ampliative inference - fallible, non-deductive. Sometimes called inference to the best explanation.

The inference would need to be fallible because behaviour is only a proxy of internal constitution, even if behavioural observations were error free. The inference would need to be non-deductive as a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a being to be conscious is not forthcoming; the concept is likely a cluster concept (also see here). Further, no behaviour strictly entails any internal state absent a background theory which fills in the gaps.

If we'd need to infer something is conscious, I can thus think of no better criterion than its behaviour compelling us to treat it as if it were conscious over a suitably large subset of concepts in the consciousness cluster.

1 ) Capability of exhibiting an "internal state", there needs to be some part of its material constitution that has representational capacity. A computer has transistors that store bits which symbolically relate to patterns, which form content of that state. Patterns of neuronal firing can take the same role.
2 ) Capability of modifying the material bearers of its "internal state" in response to environmental changes. A computer would need a sensor of some kind inputting numbers. A cell would need a chemoreceptor. This means capability of recognising a difference, storing it, and responding to it (being the site of a difference that makes a difference).
3 ) Individuation from an environment; the thing must work as a system unto itself without changing its essential constitution. EG, if you remove a water droplet from a cloud, it could be rain or steam - so this would fail. If you remove a chimp from a tree, it remains a chimp.
4 ) Homeostasis. The system should regulate itself. Bonus points if the system regulates itself in a manner that the internal state informs.
4 ) Habit of reporting its internal state. A computer read out, a human saying "I feel good today"
6 ) Exploratory habits. A bee's foraging, a human's eye movements. The thing should be seeking out causal nexuses in its environment - flowers, movements.
7 ) Expressions - predictable responses to stimuli that are identifiable with internal states ("owwie" for pain eg, an error message when you run syntactically incorrect code).
8 ) A habit of the experimenters taking an intentional stance toward the thing's behaviour would help.

Hopefully this is indicative of methodology and method. Just a hot take.

Thanks to you! I'll likely revisit some of your most recent objection just for the sake of clarifying my position (and refine it if needs be). Of course, I'd be delighted if you'd chime in again whenever you feel like it. — Pierre-Normand

@Srap Tasmaner @Michael @sime

I also want to thank you all for the same reason. Thank you bandwagon.

you know there will never be any new data, so that harmless prior metastasizes. — Srap Tasmaner

:up:

Priors supposedly representing no prejudice turning out to have major influence on results has been a thing in recent years.

Even the word "state" feels too coarse for Sleeping Beauty, since it could denote the situation a robust well-defined subject finds themselves in, or it could denote the very identity of that subject. --- At least, that's how the two main camps look to me. One wonders, where am I? how did I get here? One wonders, what am I? what has made me into this? — Srap Tasmaner

Also mega agree on this, the principle of indifference has a bunch of knowledge built into it. It assumes you know all the possible configurations something could be in, in the first place. And not just that, you know how all the variables relate within your stipulated model.

What I mean is that whenever the coin landed heads during a particular awakening, then it also landed heads during the particular experimental run this awakening is a part of, and vice versa. — Pierre-Normand

Aye I see what you mean. Thank you for your clarification. I really like the paper's use of the idea that the claim "X iff Y" works completely differently from "event X coincides with event Y", because event X and event Y both belong in different sample spaces. And we usually leave that difference unattended to.

and that both outcomes are perfectly correlated — Pierre-Normand

Perhaps it's a misnomer to call them correlated, because there's no meaningful notion of a joint event of both occurrences within the same sample space. As an analogy, it's like having one coinflip labelled with outcomes Heads and Tails, and another labelled Flibberty and Gibbet, then asking what's the probability that the Heads/Tails outcome coin comes out Flibberty or Gibbet. You can analogise the mechanisms by blurring the eyes, but that commits a category error. If that paper is to be believed.

↪fdrake I did mention this. There are two ways to reason:

1. I should reason as if I am randomly selected from the set of possible participants
2. I should reason as if my interview is randomly selected from the set of possible interviews — Michael

My use of variants, such as that of tossing the coin 100 times, was to show that applying his reasoning leads to what I believe is an absurd conclusion (that even if the experiment is only done once it is rational to believe that P(100 Heads) = 2/3). — Michael

Aye! I remember these. It was a good point. This is what put me onto the idea that there's contradictions inherent in the framing. If you end up trying to use the tiny probability of P(100 Heads) to update SB's interview credence (combining the "awakening" process with the "day sampling=coinflip" process), I think you end up in clown logic land.

Only I was wrong in saying that it was "the thirder's" position which was incoherent, it was my assumption that (roughly) the sampling mechanisms you intimated can be unproblematically combined. They appear to be talking about the same thing, but they do so so differently you end up with contradictions.

@Pierre-Normand

Aye. But you're disagreeing on whether the coin toss is the only random thing in the experiment (and realises in pairs of days), whether it's appropriate to assign a random variable to model part of SB's credence (her "subjective probability") and the relationship between that random variable and the coin toss. Like the enduring disagreement you both had regarding whether the interviews can be seen as drawn individually from a bag and have probabilities assigned to that (which can be used to support a thirder position).

The sampling mechanism determines what would create an item of data in the experiment. That could be "pairs of days" or "individual days" or "conflip result day pair triples" or whatever. The description in the OP doesn't determine one sampling mechanism, it just suggests one. Given such a mechanism, the calculations are pretty trivial.

As an example, when you (Michael) were speaking about seeing the interviews as drawn from a bag, because SB's interview-days "observe" coin toss results, that specifies a sampling mechanism on individual interview days which are conditionally related to coin tosses. Two of those interview days occur in tails, one in heads, so the probability of heads is 1/3 in that case.

Inversely, when you were speaking about seeing the awake-day pairs as drawn from a bag; (awake, not awake) for heads, (awake, awake) for tails, that either assigns the random variable "am I awake?" to the days (with values awake/not awake) or assigns a coinflip random variable to the pairs (awake, not awake) for heads and (awake, awake) for tails. If the sampling mechanism is specified the first way, the probability of heads given "awake" turns out to be 1/3 as before. But if it's on the pairs alone (and not the elements of the pairs) it turns out to be 1/2.

As @sime was intimating, a lot of the disagreement comes from how you end up assigning random variables. EG using the principle of indifference over the days for SB's day credence isn't a "neutral" move with respect to the sampling mechanism, since it conceives what day it is as a random variable which can be subject to a prior. That isn't an available move if the constitutive events of the sample space are (awake, awake) and (awake, asleep) - since the elements of both pairs are stipulated to be nonrandom in that model. This is distinguished from the bivariate approach we spoke about earlier which yields a thirder position.

This bottoms out in not agreeing on what constitutes the space of events for the random variables, rather than in the calculations I think!

It yields a natural interpretation because it enables the participant to reason about her epistemic situation in a natural way without the need to import some weird metaphysical baggage about the ways in which she is being "dropped" in her current situation — Pierre-Normand

The "metaphysical baggage" about being "dropped" into a day in the centred world case, as I see it, is a three sided equiprobable coin flip. It's only as mysterious as a coinflip. In the "non-centred" case, SB isn't "randomly dropped" into a day at all, she's instead dropped into a heads-awakening or a tails-awakening (I think).

I ended up in a state of confusion in the calculations, having a few contradictions in reasoning, which this paper elevates into framings of the experiment (including SB's setting within it) having inconsistent sample spaces between the centred and non-centred accounts. Thus yielding a "dissolution" of the paradox of the form; it's only a paradox when centred and non-centred worlds are equated.

I've been reading along, I have a meta question for you both @Pierre-Normand@Michael - why is it helpful to discuss variants which are allegedly the same as the original problem when you both don't seem to agree what the sampling mechanism in the original problem is?

Can you put them to me in excruciating detail please?

One clue to this is to let SB bet on the outcome that her credence is about and see if her betting behavior leads her to realize the EV she is anticipating. — Pierre-Normand

I never buy betting arguments unless the random variables are set up!

Then this goes back to what I said above. These are two different questions with, I believe, two different answers:

1. If the experiment is run once, what is Sleeping Beauty's credence that the coin landed heads?

2. If the experiment is repeated several times, what is the probability that a randomly selected interview from the set of all interviews followed the coin landing heads? — Michael

I agree those are different btw. They describe completely different approaches to modelling the problem. That doesn't immediately tell us which SB ought to model the situation as, or whether they're internally coherent.

I'll illustrate my reasoning about the days.

There's an issue in calculating the marginal distribution over the days for the thirder. I reasoned something like this - if you're SB, you can wake up once or twice per week. If you've woken up once per week, it seems to make sense to say that probability that you woke up on a Monday is 1. If you've woken up twice per week... Well what's the probability that you woke up on Monday? You'd wake up "half the time" on Monday and "half the time" on Tuesday, but those "half the times" would then need to apply to the case of the flip being tails.

That would give the probability of monday as P(monday and heads) + P(monday and tails), which equals P(monday|heads)P(heads)+P(monday|tails)P(tails).

P(heads) and P(tails) for the fair coin would be 0.5, as in the prior. But then I'm needing to calculate P(monday|heads). I could say that's 1. P(monday|tails) - I'd say that's 0.5. Which would give the probability of Monday as 0.5+0.5*0.5=0.75?

P(Monday)+P(Tuesday) I think should sum to 1, since they're mutually exclusive and exhaustive events. So P(Tuesday) should be 0.25.

Marginalising over awakenings and days to get a posterior probability of heads given awakening should behave like marginalising over the number of awakenings per week. As @Pierre-Normand points out, P(Awoken) (whatever event or random variable Awoken is) should look like 0.75 for the thirder position. But I'm also thinking it looks like P(Monday) is 0.75 after you take into account the impact heads and tails have on the day frequencies.

Which isn't to say P(Monday) = 0.75, It's to say something funny goes on, as saying "The probability that I'm awoken on a Monday is equal to the probability that I'm awoken at all" makes little sense.

I don't think it's rational for Sleeping Beauty to use the answer to the second question to answer the first question. I think it's only rational for Sleeping Beauty's credence that the coin landed heads 100 times in a row to be — Michael

The question which has been eating me is "What is the probability of the day being Tuesday?". I think it's necessary to be able to answer that question for the thirder position. But I've not found a way of doing it yet that makes much sense. Though I'm sure there is a way!

However, I’m wary of answers that go something like this: lonely young men are being turned into misogynists by reactionary patriarchal ideology — Jamal

It's not a very instrumental statement. Reactionary patriarchal ideology's been largely the same for decades, right. The same themes and attitudes, different forms of expression. "Why now?" is the question. Just like "Why now?" is the question for the rice of fascism from reactionary sentiment.

to which they’re being exposed because of the internet. I mean, I think that’s true, but (a) it might deflect the sociological questions, and (b) it might fail to appreciate the ideology as itself something new.

I agree. I'm discomforted by the statement because it's quite individualising. Everyone is exposed to reactionary patriarchal ideology, why do some men react by by becoming incels and others react by joining feminist causes? If you can stop the explanation at individual personality traits, it's no longer structural. There has to be some societal signal in the noise of our bodies.

It's kinda just moralism otherwise. And that can be useful as a weapon.

Yes, that makes sense, although I doubt this is always present before joining up. Intuitively I’d expect some of them to join while still thinking they’re just going through a bad patch, only universalizing and essentializing it during their indoctrination. — Jamal

Agreed. So, that's a candidate answer to:

Maybe such thoughts turn to misogyny when the intrusive thoughts become egosyntonic. When anger becomes justice.
— fdrake

A scary thought. But then … how and when does that happen? — Jamal

1. Incels or proto-incels feel loneliness in three ways: in terms of intimacy, friends, and social status. — Jamal

I also interpreted it like this. But I believe there's an additional element; those three deficiencies get internalised and seen as universal/essential to the proto-incel. Universal in the sense that reality will always treat them that way; they can give up or adapt. Essential in the sense that reality will treat them that way due to their own personal deficiencies relative to perceived norms.

Close to right-wing nut job territory? I don’t think so. — Jamal

I know, it depends. If you sound like Adorno and you make a point like: "public speech in favour of marginalised identities is often a means of garnering social capital, which appropriates the struggle for minority rights" is spicy, but probably okay. But it's largely the same as: "woke liberals virtue signal just to look good in the culture war".

I find it a difficult thing to think about in general. I'd be very suspicious of the latter on principle. I'd be suspicious of the former if it was used in defence of the latter. But I'm more inclined to think of the former as being... reasonable? Said by a non-ideologue? So I'm positively predisposed to it

That said, there's a decent argument that sometimes not being an ideologue doesn't matter. EG, a good faith poster saying the former as part of a twitter dog pile.

@Michael - you ruined my mind again god damnit.

Edit: now I'm a halfer. Damnit it's late.

Sleeping Beauty is put to sleep and a coin is tossed 100 times. If it lands heads every time then she is woken up, interviewed, and put back to sleep 2101 times, otherwise she is woken up, interviewed, and put back to sleep once. — Michael

If I understand right, if the coin is heads 100 times, she wakes up on Monday and is not woken up on Tuesday. If the coin is not heads 100 times, she wakes up on Monday and Tuesday? Then the experiment ends.

Can you write me it in the style of the OP? No variables, just when the coin flips happen, when sleeping beauty would wake up etc.

I'll analyse that case if you can describe it very specifically. Like in the OP.

Under the assumption of SB undergoing amnesia however, her mental state is uncorrelated with her understanding of B series events, and hence uncorrelated with the state of the coin. — sime

I'm basing this on the table you've given me, I think.

I'm not sure this is true. Here are my thoughts on it. If SB being awoken was independent of the state of the coin, you'd expect the probability that she is awake on Monday, and on Tuesday to be independent of the state of the coin. By independent there I mean "joint probability is equal to the product of the marginals".

The probability that she is awake on Monday would be 1, if it were considered as a random variable by itself it would be a constant ("Awake Mon = True"), and so independent from any other random variable. The probability that she is awake on Tuesday, however, is just a relabelling of the coin flip. Specifically, the two types of events (Awake on Tuesday) and (Coinflip) are a measurable function f of each other;

Awake on Tuesday=f(Tails)
Asleep on Tuesday=f(Heads)

Which thereby means, since compositions of measurable functions are measurable (I believe) whether they are awake on Tuesday is a random variable when the coinflip is.

Explicitly terms of your table, it looks like this:

(Awake on Tuesday, Awake on Monday) = g(Tails)
(Asleep on Tuesday, Awake on Monday) = g(Heads)

Where the function maps the coin flip results to the awake/asleep bit of the table. They're not independent, one totally determines the other.

I appreciated your example, because it's getting at something which seems fundamental about the problem - our intuitions seem to suggest not every normalised measurable function (on a space of events) can be considered a random variable. But that's just what they are mathematically.

According to this parameterisation, it doesn't make sense to ask SB "what Day is Today?" for "Today" isn't a random variable of the sample-space. (Thirders implicitly ask this question). But all that can be talked about, according to this parameterisation, is the state of the coin and whether SB is awoken on both monday and tuesday, and not "what day is today?". — sime

I see. This one is clear. I'll have a think about it.

$\begin{array} {|r|r|}\hline Flip & Day & Status \\ \hline Heads & Monday & Awake \\ \hline Heads & Tuesday & Asleep \\ \hline Tails & Monday & Awake \\ \hline Tails & Tuesday & Awake \\ \hline \end{array}$

I think that's all possible outcomes. You can calculate the probabilities by the proportion of their occurrence in the table. You can also subset to calculate conditional probabilities.

From that you can say P(Heads)=0.5, P(Awake)=3/4, P(Awake|Heads)=0.5, P(Heads|Awake)=1/3 .

It's interesting that the principle of indifference prior on 3 interview days (what I did before) gives 1/3, which is the same as the frequency table here. Though my previous calculation was silly as the logic which ties Day to Flip in the 2 interview case also ties Days to Flip in my shite 3 day interpretation. The frequency table calculation there gives 2/5 . I've flagged my previous attempt as misinformation.

So I'm still a thirder, even though my previous calculation is wrong lol.

So what if the coin toss doesn’t happen until after the Monday interview? Does that affect your answer? — Michael

It wouldn't in this case I think. I'm going to commit now to writing 1 if my random number generator spits out 1, and 0 if it spits out 0. It spat out 1. If I'd computed it earlier, I would've written the same thing.

More extremely, if someone wrote down the study plan for heads and tails on specific weeks, and coin flipped them, it would behave exactly the same as if they flipped them at the appropriate times in the experiment.

It would be different if SB knew the "sampling day" AND the "sampling day" informed what the RNG did. In that case I'd need a prewritten plan of SB's random responses to the different sampling days too.

I am also confused now. God damnit. I fear I answered the wrong question.

Two urns, one with a single white marble, one with many black marbles; you flip a coin to decide which urn to draw from; even though there are more black marbles than white, the chances of getting the white marble are equal to the chances of getting one of the many blacks. — Srap Tasmaner

:up:

The argument I've been making lately seems to be roughly this: if you close your eyes and someone selects a marble and places it in your hand, and if you know there are more black marbles than white, then you can figure it's more likely to be black. Fair enough. — Srap Tasmaner

:up:

But if you know they selected the marble in your hand by flipping a coin to select which urn to draw from, you should figure it's just as likely to be the one white as any of the blacks. — Srap Tasmaner

:up:

This works with Heads for Monday alone, Tails for Tuesday alone and no Wednesday. If the chance of the coin being heads depended upon the number of marbles in the jar, we're in a closer situation to OP's SB, I think.

and missing SB's uncertainty about her own state. — Srap Tasmaner

Indeed. What I'm imagining the halfer position as is that the probability of flipping a coin is always half, and that sleeping beauty's state of awakeness has no correlation with the coin. Whereas you know it does, as the "sampling day" of SB's report depends upon the coin flip. An analogy there might be asking shoppers on a Saturday what day they shop for longest on. Asking the question that way, itself, influences the responses.

The problem vexing the minds of experts is as follows: Sleeping Beauty agrees to participate in an experiment. On Sunday she is given a sleeping pill and falls asleep. One of the experimenters then tosses a coin. If “heads” comes up, the scientists awaken Sleeping Beauty on Monday. Afterward, they administer another sleeping pill. If “tails” comes up, they wake Sleeping Beauty up on Monday, put her back to sleep and wake her up again on Tuesday. Then they give her another sleeping pill. In both cases, they wake her up again on Wednesday, and the experiment ends.

The important thing here is that because of the sleeping drug, Sleeping Beauty has no memory of whether she was woken up before. So when she wakes up, she cannot distinguish whether it is Monday or Tuesday. The experimenters do not tell Sleeping Beauty either the outcome of the coin toss nor the day.

They ask her one question after each time she awakens, however: What is the probability that the coin shows heads?

EDIT: MISINFORMATION

Timeline:
1) Sleeping Beauty falls asleep on Sunday evening.
2) The experimenter tosses a coin. Call this random variable F.
2_1a) If F=heads, Sleeping Beauty is awoken on Monday morning.
2_1b) After 2_1a, the experimenters put Sleeping Beauty to sleep by giving her a sleeping pill.
2_2a) If F=tails, Sleeping Beauty is awoken on Monday morning.
2_2b) After 2_2a) F=tails, Sleeping Beauty is put to sleep again and awoken on Tuesday morning, then put back to sleep.
3) Sleeping beauty is awoken on Wednesday morning.

Seeping Beauty does not know the outcome of the coin toss, nor the day. She does know the logic in 2_1a), 2_1)b, 2_2a) and 2_2b). Let's just assume this occurs every week, forever.

When she wakes up she doesn't know if it's Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday. All she knows is that she has woken up. You then ask what's the probability of heads given that she's woken up? That means knowing what "Awoken on a day" means... And since she doesn't know what day it is, that's more conditional reasoning.

She's awoken every Wednesday (from 3), she's awoken every Monday (from 2_1a) and (2_2a), she's awoken on a Tuesday iff 2_2b) is triggered, which occurs when and only when 2_2a) is triggered, which is equivalent to F=tails. She also doesn't know what day it is.

I'd need to model "Awoken on a day" as a compound event of "Day" and "Awoken", Day can take values Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Awoken can take values "Asleep" or "Awake". If I recall correctly this formula lets you marginalise conditional distributions over another variable:

P(A|B) = P(A|B,C1)P(C1) + P(A|B,C2)P(C2)

Where C1 and C2 are disjoint events. I'm going to use A as the coinflip, B as Awoken and C as Day (so there'll be three rather than two). Now let's go onto the probabilities...

P(F=Heads|Awoken=Awake)=
P(F=Heads|Awoken=Awake, Day=Monday)P(Day=Monday) +
P(F=Heads|Awoken=Awake, Day=Tuesday)P(Day=Tuesday) +
P(F=Heads|Awoken=Awake, Day=Wednesday)P(Day=Wednesday)

P(Monday)=P(Tuesday)=P(Wednesday)=1/3 , assuming principle of indifference and the experiment runs only over these days.
EDIT: DON'T USE INDIFFERENCE HERE, WEDNESDAY'S VARIABLE DAY IS LINKED TO FLIP
P(Heads|Awake, Monday) - how many times is the coin heads if she's awoken on a Monday? She knows the experimental plan, so this should be 0.5 .
P(Heads|Awake, Tuesday) - how many times is the coin heads if she's awoken on a Tuesday? Should be 0. Since she can't wake up on a Tuesday unless F=tails.
P(Heads|Awake, Wednesday) - how many times is the coin heads if she's awoken on a Wednesday? Should be 0.5, since she's always woken up on a Wednesday.

That means we've got (1/3)*0.5+(1/3)*0.5=1/3 probability for P(Heads|Awake). Seems I'm a thirder.

EDIT: MISINFORMATION

Part of it is sweeping generalisation and essentialising. Someone mutters a mere hint of anti-feminist or mysoginistic rhetoric and boom, people jump to conclusions like hopscotch. One becomes defined by what may have been a singular momentary thought or consideration.

The other part is attitude. If some does indeed have a consistent, enduring and caustically negative attitude towards dating or is preoccupied with lamenting over the quality of their sex life, people like to have words for such phenomena especially if they have seen a lot of people with the same behaviour. We by our very nature love to categorise everything from people to places to things into near little groups. — Benj96

I agree with the first bit. It's easy to be essentialised for one "bad look" in public. Or someone uncharitably shitting on you being taken as truth. I also agree with the second bit, and as a tendency it bugs me.

Incels: a misogynist hate movement so extreme they approve of enslaving and raping women. Living embodiments of rape culture as @unenlightened and @Baden astutely point out.

Bloke who gets frustrated with lack of romance in their life: not a threat, could fester if they don't check themselves.

From the perspective of a gay man long gone from the dating scene, it does seem like these (mostly young?) straight men have a bad case of self-loathing, which in itself is odd and surprising-- that straight white men would be filled with self-loathing--if that's what it is. — BC

I've no idea why it's so commonplace. My intuition asks that if self loathing is commonplace, what makes so many cis het white men hate themselves? If I knew that I'd be writing an exploitative self help book.

For what its worth, a gay mate of mine has no trouble finding sex through dating apps, but partnerships seem elusive.

The healthy way to deal with that lack of success is to try harder, seek help from friends and professionals, join social groups and other such things. But many aren't healthy and many lash out. — Hanover

I get the feeling that this, as partner finding advice, is quite dated. The last few conversations I had with women about "men approaching you in social venues" is that it's seen as highly intrusive, bordering on... creepy. Consent through dating app swipe seems to be needed for them. Or alternatively, they need to be the one to approach a bloke.

I of course don't know how commonplace this is. (Sample size 6 cis het women).

They were cancelled? — Jamal

Yes!

It's because our system doesn't assure success for too many people. — Hanover

My Internal Twitter is screaming at you for this.

Ensure success? What, like women finding partners is a matter of men performing a role? Where is their agency and choice! Male entitlement belongs in the dustbin of history, this is not a good look.

I don't believe my Internal Twitter. My only reason for telling you what it says is to highlight what happens if you say things like that in public. You get uncharitably shat on...

Since the community that these young men feel is most important in their lives is made up of remote individuals who are free to ratchet up the extreme opinions without any personal consequences, they never meet the healthy opposition that they would have met in the old-style community of people, most of whom they would not have chosen to associate with. — Jamal

I'm willing to bet that what can happen when you speak up about frustrations/anger at loneliness and romantic failure also contributes to making insular those awful communities, virtually. You get social shunning. People from your life disappear when you appear to have a problematic opinion. Social media etiquette IRL.

My Internal Twitter is telling me that what I just said construes those feelings of resentment as the responsibility of women to address. But it doesn't, if it's true it's simply tragic, no moral obligations involved

Is it another example of what Adorno referred to as pseudo-activism, where what matters is the badges you wear, the signals you transmit, and the minimal action you take—no matter how useless—according to templates that define your political fashion? — Jamal

I think this is approximately true. Though it's also hard to talk in lots of spaces without sounding like a right wing nut job. The reasons being - what you're describing is close to the intended meaning of "virtue signalling", which is seen as a far right canard (it is) which gets used to undermine legitimate activism, undermine even moral disagreements. An act of virtue signalling thus construed makes sense as an attempt to shift the Overton window of public discourse - which is close to the intended meaning of the "culture war" (another canard). I get the impression relatively little of this behaviour happens in grassroots orgs (sample size 1).

Do you see a way to thread the needle here without steering into right wing nut job territory? We were also pretty close when trying to humanise "pre-incels".

They were cancelled? — Jamal

Yes. But IRL. Organising meat space meetups, nowadays, follows Twitter logic. When you do it through a meet ups server. It is scary. It might just be my environment though!

Wasn't aimed at you anyhow bruv. Skimmed through the thread and saw some odd comments that seemed to underplay what's going on so I thought I'd stick my oar in. — Baden

Cheers pal. I'm super sensitised to this because one of my mates lost a lot of their acquaintances because they complained about a bad run of dates, in public, in a frustrated manner. Entitled, resentment, etc. Rumour spread like wildfire.

They are not morally superior to any other hate group and the most charitable thing I can say about anyone who doesn't realise that is that they're misguided and/or ignorant. — Baden

I agree!

Where I'm coming from in this thread is that I've seen people be called incels online, or in person, when they're blokes frustrated with dating culture. And I'm interested in what creates incels. How do you go from being normal to the resentment pit?

So I wonder how much crossover there is between incels and the sexually successful misogynist “pick-up artists”. Maybe you can graduate from the former to the latter. — Jamal

Not an expert, but I think the pick up artist people sprouted off into the incels. An incel being a pick up artist failure who can't even manipulate women to get laid.

, there's still no reason to switch, so the paradox has nothing to do with probability at all. — Michael

Eh, probability modelling also includes assigning random variables. It has a lot to do with what random variables you put in play.

Besides an opportunity to play with our respective toys, do you get anything out of this? — Srap Tasmaner

I could imagine using it for teaching probability modelling. Get students to analyse the problem. Then do it IRL with both sampling mechanisms. Should be a cool demonstration of "physical" differences between what's seen as a merely "epistemic" probability assignment!

I don't see any disagreement. — Srap Tasmaner

Same. Alright, I'm a bit less confused now. Thank you.