forum 5: week of 6 Feb. Hawthorne and lotteries

I cannot bring myself to approve of most of the examples that Hawthorne supplies beyond, perhaps, his example including eating salmon. There seems to me a slippery trick in connecting a "now" proposition with a "then" proposition as we continually do. The little word "will" makes such a difference, as does the difference between have and am! That I have hands is indisputable, regardless of whether or not I am also a brain in a vat. That I will tend the dog tomorrow does not hinge on whether or not I have a heart attack tonight. I understand that in epistemology we're not interested in collapsing wave fronts and following branches of time, but each of Hawthorne's examples seems to do just that without actually solving the issue of how to travel forward and back along the correct timeline and stay in the correct possible world!