From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Tue Apr 29 2003 - 02:22:39 MDT
At 02:17 AM 4/29/03 -0500, you wrote:
>> The argument is utterly flawed. There is no such thing as a
>> human picked at random from all those that will ever be in all
>> time when the choosing is done *at a particular point in time*.
>It's a lot more subtle than that: There's nothing at all wrong
>with picking a sample from items spread out in time, even into
>the future. ...
>mathematically useful ways. The problem is (1) picking from an
>presumably bounded, but unspecified, range (from big bang to some
>unspecified point in the future), and (2) using that as a premise
>for arguing about what that future bound is.
Off to top of my head (I've read Leslie's book, but a long time ago), it
strikes me that the way the analysis is done might depend on your choice of
metric (if that's what I mean). Rather than supposing that we here&now are
a random sample of the simple numerical count of all intelligent hominids
who will ever live, maybe we could apply the same mediocratic logic to
*which generation* we represent. In that case, human generations might be
expected to persist for at least another 60,000 years--say, 2000
generations, with us in the middle. Of course once you start to change the
meaning of `human' and the length of `generation', that might be even more
hopeful.
Damien Broderick
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