From: Nick Bostrom (bostrom@ndirect.co.uk)
Date: Tue Mar 30 1999 - 07:13:09 MST
Billy Brown wrote:
> Hmmm. Wouldn't this be more correctly phrased as a prediction about the
> number of gaussian humans that will exist in the future? The number of
> posthumans currently living appears to be 0, which means you'd need an
> entirely different chain of reasoning to predict *their* likelihood of
> survival.
It depends on whether posthumans and humans are in the same reference
class, i.e. whether we should reason as if we were randomly sampled
from the class of both posthumans and humans, or from the class
consisting of only humans. An unsolved problem in my opinion. Notice
that it would seem more difficult to argue that posthumans are in a
different reference class if humans could actually *personally
become* posthumans while remaining the same person.
Nick Bostrom
http://www.hedweb.com/nickb n.bostrom@lse.ac.uk
Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method
London School of Economics
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