From: Darin Sunley (dsunley@shaw.ca)
Date: Sun Jun 01 2003 - 14:05:16 MDT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Harvey Newstrom" <mail@harveynewstrom.com>
To: <extropians@extropy.org>
Sent: Sunday, June 01, 2003 1:19 PM
Subject: RE: Slashdot - The Computational Requirements for the Matrix
>
> I've never understood this. Doesn't the anthropic principle also lead to
> the Doomsday Argument <http://www.anthropic-principle.com/> that argues
> humans DO go extinct in geologically short time? >
>
When I first heard of the Doomsday Argument on this list, I thought about it
for a while. It felt to me like one of those humorous math "proofs", where
the author buries a divide by zero somewhere and ends up proving every
number identical. When I turned the Doomsday Argument over in my head, it
sort of seemed like the assumption of a last human being was inherently
built into the argument. Furthermore, the Doomsday Argument seemed to make a
significant assumption about the temporal distribution of humans within the
set of all humans. It seems to assume that human birth rates will reach
their maximum at or shortly before the last human is born.
I thought about how similar logic would apply to a reference class that was
known to be countably infinite, just to see how it would work. As near as I
can tell, the Doomsday Argument cannot predict the end of humanity without
first postulating the end of humanity. It only follows if that assumption,
plus the assumption that human birth rates will not decrease immediatley
before the last human is born, are postulated.
The only remaining axiom that the Doomsday Argument has for predictive
purposes is the observation that, all things being equal, a given human,
randomly selected from their reference class, can expect to have been born
during a period when birth rates were high. This postulate, by itself, does
not predict the end of humanity. There are many possible histories of
humanity that are perfectly compatible with all of the statistics of the
Doomsday Argument that do not require the last human to be born during the
time of the highest birth rates.
Darin Sunley
dsunley@shaw.ca
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