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:
“Indeed, the Englishman’s history of New England commences only when it ceases to be New France.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)