From: Nick Bostrom (bostrom@ndirect.co.uk)
Date: Tue Mar 30 1999 - 07:13:09 MST
Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> In the DA,
> the universe of events is "all possible physical universes"--a
> concept so ill-defined that one could write pages just on what
> that means.
Actually the situation is no worse than for any other method you have
of trying to predict any future event. Specify two hypotheses--say
extinction after 200 billion humans vs. extinction after 200 trillion
humans--and you can apply to the DA to see how the probability shifts
after taking into account the fact that you live at a time when less
than 200 billion humans have been born.
> The second assumption, of course, is self-sampling. That too has
> more problems in the DA than here, because in the DA we must make
> some assumption about just what we are a sample of, whereas in the
> problem above that's a given.
That is true, but those assumptions affect only the scope of the DA,
not its validity.
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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