The Doomsday argument and the self-indication assumption: Reply to Olum

Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 53, Issue 210, 2003, Pages 83-91

  Bostrom, Nick ^a   Ćirković, Milan M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 3943103692     PISSN: 00318094     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9213.00298     Document Type: Article

References (17)

1. Originally in J. Leslie, 'Risking the World's End', Bulletin of the Canadian Nuclear Society, May 10-15 (1989)
2. He has a more comprehensive treatment in The End of the World: the Science and Ethics of Human Extinction (London: Routledge, 1996)
3. Carter did not publish on the doomsday argument. A different version of it, which we shall not discuss here, was independently discovered by Richard Gott, 'Implications of the Copernican Principle for our Future Prospects', Nature, 363 (27 May 1993), pp. 315-19
4. Originally in N. Bostrom, 'Investigations into the Doomsday Argument', unpublished MS, http://www.anthropic-principles.com/preprints/inv/ investigations.html (1997)
5. see also 'The Doomsday Argument is Alive and Kicking', Mind, 108 (1999), pp. 539-50
6. 'Observer-Relative Chances in Anthropic Reasoning?', Erkenntnis, 52 (2000), pp. 93-108
7. ++, and Quantum Joe', Synthese, 127 (2001), pp. 359-87
8. and esp. Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2002)
9. K. Olum, 'The Doomsday Argument and the Number of Possible Observers', The Philosophical Quarterly, 52 (2002), pp. 164-84
10. D. Dieks, 'Doomsday - or: the Dangers of Statistics', The Philosophical Quarterly 42 (1992), pp. 78-84
11. see also 'The Doomsday Argument', available at http://philsci-archive. pitt.edu/documents/disko/00/00/02/47/index.html
12. T. Kopf et al., 'Too Soon for Doom Gloom', preprint, http://xxx.lanl.gov/ abs/gr-qc/9407002 (1994)
13. P. Bartha and C. Hitchcock, 'No One Knows the Date or the Hour: an Unorthodox Application of Rev. Bayes' Theorem', Philosophy of Science (Proceedings), 66 (1999), pp. S329-S53
14. Bostrom, Anthropic Bias, p. 134
15. Bradley Monton (above, pp. 79-82) argues that the doomsday argument is applicable in the absence of knowledge about one's birth rank. We disagree, but lack the space here for a detailed analysis
16. -30)
17. R. Plaga, 'Proposal for an Experimental Test of the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics', Found. Phys., 27 (1997), p. 559-77