History
This objection to the Doomsday Argument (DA), originally by Dennis Dieks (1992), developed by Bartha & Hitchcock (1999), and expanded by Ken Olum (2001), is that the possibility of you existing at all depends on how many humans will ever exist (N). If N is big, then the chance of you existing is higher than if only a few humans will ever exist. Since you do indeed exist, this is evidence that N is high. The argument is sometimes expressed in an alternative way by having the posterior marginal distribution of n based on N without explicitly invoking a non-zero chance of existing. The Bayesian inference mathematics are identical.
The current name for this attack within the (very active) DA community is the "Self-Indication Assumption" (SIA), proposed by one of its opponents, the DA-advocate Nick Bostrom. His (2000) definition reads:
- SIA: Given the fact that you exist, you should (other things equal) favor hypotheses according to which many observers exist over hypotheses on which few observers exist.
A development of Dieks's original paper by Kopf, Krtous and Page (1994), showed that the SIA precisely cancels out the effect of the Doomsday Argument, and therefore, one's birth position (n) gives no information about the total number of humans that will exist (N). This conclusion of SIA is uncontroversial with modern DA-proponents, who instead question the validity of the assumption itself, not the conclusion which would follow, if the SIA were true.
Read more about this topic: Self-Indication Assumption Doomsday Argument Rebuttal
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and interrelatedness. And they are all talking at once!”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)