Related papers: Doomsday: Two Flaws
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…
Whether the fate of our species can be forecast from its past has been the topic of considerable controversy. One refutation of the so-called Doomsday Argument is based on the premise that we are more likely to exist in a universe…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
In several papers, John Norton has argued that Bayesianism cannot handle ignorance adequately due to its inability to distinguish between neutral and disconfirming evidence. He argued that this inability sows confusion in, e.g., anthropic…
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…
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…
Every philosophy has holes, and it is the responsibility of proponents of a philosophy to point out these problems. Here are a few holes in Bayesian data analysis: (1) the usual rules of conditional probability fail in the quantum realm,…
Bayesian inference is used to estimate continuous parameter values given measured data in many fields of science. The method relies on conditional probability densities to describe information about both data and parameters, yet the notion…
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.…
When combining apparently inconsistent experimental results, one often implements errors on errors. The Particle Data Group's phenomenological prescription offers a practical solution but lacks a firm theoretical foundation. To address…
This paper presents a plausible reasoning system to illustrate some broad issues in knowledge representation: dualities between different reasoning forms, the difficulty of unifying complementary reasoning styles, and the approximate nature…
We revisit anthropic arguments purporting to explain the measured value of the cosmological constant. We argue that different ways of assigning probabilities to candidate universes lead to totally different anthropic predictions. As an…
In causal inference confounding may be controlled either through regression adjustment in an outcome model, or through propensity score adjustment or inverse probability of treatment weighting, or both. The latter approaches, which are…
The derivation of the quantum retrodictive probability formula involves an error, an ambiguity. The end result is correct because this error appears twice, in such a way as to cancel itself. In addition, however, the usual expression for…
Modern scientific cosmology pushes the boundaries of knowledge and the knowable. This is prompting questions on the nature of scientific knowledge. A central issue is what defines a 'good' model. When addressing global properties of the…