The Doomsday Argument Adam & Eve, UN++, and Quantum Joe

The Doomsday argument purports to show that the risk of the human species going extinct soon has been systematically underestimated. This argument has something in common with controversial forms of reasoning in other areas, including: game theoretic problems with imperfect recall, the methodology of cosmology, the epistemology of indexical belief, and the debate over so-called fine-tuning arguments for the design hypothesis. The common denominator is a certain premiss: the Self-Sampling Assumption. We present two strands of argument in favor of this assumption. Through a series of thought experiments we then investigate some bizarre prima facie consequences – backward causation, psychic powers, and an apparent conflict with the Principal Principle.

[1]  K. Olum.  The Doomsday Argument and the Number of Possible Observers , 2000, gr-qc/0009081.

[2]  Are Cosmological Theories Compatible with All Possible Evidence: A Missing Methodological Link , 2002 .

[3]  Adam Elga,et al.  Self‐locating belief and the Sleeping Beauty problem , 2000 .

[4]  J. Colquhoun,et al.  A matter of chance. , 1992, Australian family physician.

[5]  The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction , 1996 .

[6]  The doomsday argument is alive and kicking , 1999 .

[7]  B. Carter.  The anthropic selection principle and the ultra-Darwinian synthesis. , 1993 .

[8]  R. Ellis,et al.  Measurements of $\Omega$ and $\Lambda$ from 42 high redshift supernovae , 1998, astro-ph/9812133.

[9]  P. Steinhardt,et al.  Cosmology - The cosmic triangle: Revealing the state of the universe , 1999, astro-ph/9906463.

[10]  D. Lewis,et al.  Symposium: Chance and CredenceHumean Supervenience Debugged , 1994 .

[11]  Ned Hall.  Correcting The Guide to Objective Chance , 1994 .

[12]  B. Carter.  The anthropic principle and its implications for biological evolution , 1983, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences.

[13]  Martin Harry Greenberg,et al.  The End of the World , 1974 .

[14]  Too soon for doom gloom , 1994, gr-qc/9407002.

[15]  Adam J. Grove,et al.  On the Expected Value of Games with Absentmindedness , 1997 .

[16]  Doomsday--Or: The Dangers of Statistics , 1992 .

[17]  The Hubble constant and the expansion age of the Universe , 1999, astro-ph/9909076.

[18]  Andrei Linde.  Inflation and quantum cosmology. , 1986 .

[19]  David Lewis,et al.  Papers in metaphysics and epistemology: Humean Supervenience debugged , 1999 .

[20]  Evidence for a positive cosmological constant from flows of galaxies and distant supernovae , 1999, Nature.

[21]  Richard C. Jeffrey,et al.  Studies in inductive logic and probability , 1971 .

[22]  J. L. Mackie,et al.  The Matter of Chance. , 1971 .

[23]  Ariel Rubinstein,et al.  On the Interpretation of Decision Problems with Imperfect Recall , 1996, TARK.

[24]  G. Ellis,et al.  The case for an open Universe , 1994, Nature.

[25]  J. Leslie.  Doom and Probabilities , 1993 .

[26]  N. Bostrom.  Observational selection effects and probability , 2000 .

[27]  D. Lewis.  A Subjectivist’s Guide to Objective Chance , 1980 .

[28]  J. Gott.  Implications of the Copernican principle for our future prospects , 1993, Nature.

[29]  Christopher Hitchcock,et al.  No One Knows the Date or the Hour: An Unorthodox Application of Rev. Bayes's Theorem , 1999, Philosophy of Science.

[30]  J. Richard Gott.  Future prospects discussed , 1994, Nature.

[31]  Observer-Relative Chances In Anthropic Reasoning? , 2000 .

[32]  D. Raine.  General relativity , 1980, Nature.

[33]  Andreas Reisenegger,et al.  Clusters, lensing, and the future of the universe : a symposium held in Conjunction with the 160th Annual Meeting of the ASP at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, 26-28 June 1995 , 1996 .

[34]  M. Thau.  Undermining and Admissibility , 1994 .

[35]  J. Perry.  Frege on Demonstratives , 1977 .

[36]  Christopher Hitchcock,et al.  The Shooting-Room Paradox and Conditionalizing on Measurably Challenged Sets , 2004, Synthese.