Critique of The Self-referencing Doomsday Argument Rebuttal
This "meta"-DA application of the concept to the DA itself, requires some assumptions that are not universally accepted:
- The hypothesis that the same reasoning can be applied to the lifetime of mathematical theories as can be applied to the survival time of a species. One difference is that evidence exists for the average "lifetime" of a scientific (falsifiable) prediction; there are libraries full of refuted, unrefuted, and forgotten papers published on mathematics.
- The truth-value of the DA and the survival of the human race are un-correlated in the simple calculation above.
- The concept that the DA is susceptible to refutation; if the DA is not falsifiable then there is no mechanism for refuting it, even if it is false. This would make it incomparable to mortal survival. (Landsberg & Dewynne say that the DA is a physical theory rather than a mathematical hypothesis, and that any such theory is inherently falsifiable, as "experience has shown that any theory in physics, however successful, is only an approximation to reality and will eventually be refuted and require modification." )
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