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Reasoning About the Future: Doom and Beauty.

Dieks, Dennis (2005) Reasoning About the Future: Doom and Beauty. [Preprint]

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Abstract

According to the Doomsday Argument we have to rethink the probabilities we assign to a soon or not so soon extinction of mankind when we realize that we are living now, rather early in the history of mankind. Sleeping Beauty finds herself in a similar predicament: on learning the date of her first awakening, she is asked to re-evaluate the probabilities of her two possible future scenarios. In connection with Doom, I argue that it is wrong to assume that our ordinary probability judgements do not already reflect our place in history: we justify the predictive use we make of the probabilities yielded by science (or other sources of information) by our knowledge of the fact that we live now, a certain time before the possible occurrence of the events the probabilities refer to. Our degrees of belief should change drastically when we forget the date---importantly, this follows without invoking the ``Self Indication Assumption''. Subsequent conditionalization on information about which year it is cancels this probability shift again. The Doomsday Argument is about such probability \textit{shifts}, but tells us nothing about the concrete values of the probabilities---for these, experience provides the only basis. Essentially the same analysis applies to the Sleeping Beauty problem. I argue that Sleeping Beauty ``thirders'' should be committed to thinking that the Doomsday Argument is ineffective; whereas ``halfers'' should agree that doom is imminent---but they are wrong.


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Item Type: Preprint
Creators:
CreatorsEmailORCID
Dieks, Dennis
Keywords: Sleeping Beauty; Doomsday Argument; Bayesian reasoning; Temporal Evidence
Subjects: Specific Sciences > Probability/Statistics
General Issues > Decision Theory
General Issues > Confirmation/Induction
Depositing User: Dennis Dieks
Date Deposited: 13 Jan 2005
Last Modified: 07 Oct 2010 15:13
Item ID: 2144
Subjects: Specific Sciences > Probability/Statistics
General Issues > Decision Theory
General Issues > Confirmation/Induction
Date: January 2005
URI: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/2144

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