Re: Doomsday Argument (was: a baysian solution)

From: Wei Dai <weidai.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Sat, 2 May 1998 18:11:15 -0700

On Mon, Apr 27, 1998 at 10:13:36PM +0000, Nick Bostrom wrote:
> It doesn't lead to absurd conclusions if he reagards M as a
> random sample from all *actual* mind state (instances). It's only if
> he erroneously think of it as a random sample from all possible mind
> states that he gets the consesequence that there are more mind states
> than he previously thought.

I guess I was missing something obvious. Since using personal pronouns in
the present tense doesn't seem to lead to problems, we can let P(I
experience X|Universe Y is the actual universe) be the fraction of
person-instants in universe Y that is experiencing X. (I think this is
what you're suggesting.) This leads to more intuitive results and does not
run into the copying paradoxes since they're based on using personal
pronouns in the future tense.
Received on Sat May 02 1998 - 18:15:05 PDT