Related papers: Doomsday: A Response to Simpson's Second Question
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…
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 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…
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…
It is notorious that quantum mechanics cannot predict well-defined values for all physical quantities. Less well-known, however, is the fact that quantum mechanics is unable to furnish -- without additional assumptions -- probabilistic…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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,…
One of the basic peoblems of quantum cosmology is the problem of time. Various solutions have been proposed for this problem. One approach is to use the Bohmian time. Another Approach is to use the probabilistic time which was recently…
In this article, we survey some controversial problems concerning the idea of erasing Which Way information proposed in recent years. A statistical examination of these proposals suggests that whenever the Bayesian rule is taken into…
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 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,…
Bohmian mechanics can be generalized to a relativistic theory without preferred foliation, with a price of introducing a puzzling concept of spacetime probability conserved in a scalar time. We explain how analogous concept appears…
For many years now it has become conventional for theorists to argue that "space-time is doomed", with the difficulties in finding a quantum theory of gravity implying the necessity of basing a fundamental theory on something quite…
In this note we first consider local times of random walks killed at leaving positive half-axis. We prove that the distribution of the properly rescaled local time at point $N$ conditioned on being positive converges towards an exponential…
Non-compact symmetries cannot be fully broken by randomness since non-compact groups have no invariant probability distributions. In particular, this makes trickier the "Copernican" random choice of the place of the observer in infinite…
The assumption that a complete description of an early state of the universe does not privilege any position or direction in space leads to a unified account of probability in cosmology, macroscopic physics, and quantum mechanics. Such a…
Recent accounts of probability in the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics are vulnerable due to their dependence on probability theory per se. For this reason, the many worlds interpretation continues to suffer from the…