Related papers: Apocalypse Now? Reviving the Doomsday Argument
If the human race comes to an end relatively shortly, then we have been born at a fairly typical time in history of humanity. On the other hand, if humanity lasts for much longer and trillions of people eventually exist, then we have been…
The Doomsday Argument (DA) has sparked a variety of opinions. Here I address a key question posed by F. Simpson (2016) that confronts the views of DA proponents and those who, like me, oppose the DA. I agree that typical locations within a…
You and I are highly unlikely to exist in a civilization that has produced only 70 billion people, yet we find ourselves in just such a civilization. Our circumstance, which seems difficult to explain, is easily accounted for if (1) many…
The doomsday argument is a probabilistic argument that claims to predict the total lifetime of the human race. By examining the case of an individual lifetime, I conclude that the argument is fundamentally related to consciousness. I derive…
We analyze the arguments allegedly supporting the so-called Self-Indication Assumption (SIA), as an attempt to reject counterintuitive consequences of the Doomsday Argument of Carter, Leslie, Gott and others. Several arguments purportedly…
Here I argue that the much-discussed Doomsday Argument (DA) has two flaws. Its mathematical flaw stems from applying frequentist probability or faulty Bayesian inference. Its conceptual flaw is assuming that Copernican uniformity applies to…
A number of problems in physics, mathematics, and philosophy involve observers in given situations which lead to debates about whether observer-specific information should affect the probability for some outcome or hypothesis. Our purpose…
Given a sufficiently large universe, numerous civilizations almost surely exist. Some of these civilizations will be short-lived and die out relatively early in their development, i.e., before having the chance to spread to other planets.…
This paper uses anthropic reasoning to argue for a reduced likelihood that superintelligent AI will come into existence in the future. To make this argument, a new principle is introduced: the Super-Strong Self-Sampling Assumption (SSSSA),…
Ambitious civilizations that expand for resources at an intergalactic scale could be observable from a cosmological distance, but how likely is one to be visible to us? The question comes down to estimating the appearance rate of such…
The Simulation Argument posed by Bostrom (2003) suggests that we may be living inside a sophisticated computer simulation. If post-human civilizations eventually have both the capability and desire to generate such Bostrom-like simulations,…
Recent developments in cosmology indicate that every history having a nonzero probability is realized in infinitely many distinct regions of spacetime. Thus, it appears that the universe contains infinitely many civilizations exactly like…
Even when completely and consistently formulated, a fundamental theory of physics and cosmological boundary conditions may not give unambiguous and unique predictions for the universe we observe; indeed inflation, string/M theory, and…
The missionary zeal of many Bayesians of old has been matched, in the other direction, by a view among some theoreticians that Bayesian methods are absurd-not merely misguided but obviously wrong in principle. We consider several examples,…
Bayesian probability theory is used to analyze the oft-made assumption that humans are typical observers in the universe. Some theoretical calculations make the {\it selection fallacy} that we are randomly chosen from a class of objects by…
Recent decades have seen an interest in prediction problems for which Bayesian methodology has been used ubiquitously. Sampling from or approximating the posterior predictive distribution in a Bayesian model allows one to make inferential…
This paper uses anthropic reasoning to argue for the Non-Arbitrary Existence Hypothesis (NAEH). Nick Bostrom's Self-Sampling Assumption (SSA) combined with NAEH is compared against SSA without such an assumption and also SSA with the…
The Doomsday argument and anthropic reasoning are two puzzling examples of probabilistic confirmation. In both cases, a lack of knowledge apparently yields surprising conclusions. Since they are formulated within a Bayesian framework, they…
Typicality arguments attempt to use the Copernican Principle to draw conclusions about the cosmos and presently unknown conscious beings within it, including extraterrestrial intelligences (ETI). The most notorious is the Doomsday Argument,…
In the modern quantum mechanics of cosmology observers are physical systems within the universe. They have no preferred role in the formulation of the theory nor in its predictions of third person probabilities of what occurs. However,…