Anthropic Bias - complete text
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Contents
- Acknowledgements xi
- Preface xiii
- Chapter 1: Introduction 1
- Chapter 2: Fine-tuning in cosmology 11
- Chapter 3: Anthropic principles: the motley family 43
- Chapter 4: Thought experiments supporting the self-sampling assumption 59
- Chapter 5: The self-sampling assumption in science 73
- Chapter 6: The doomsday argument 89
- Chapter 7: Invalid objections against the doomsday argument 109
- Doesn’t the Doomsday argument fail to “target the truth”? 109
- The “baby-paradox” 111
- Isn’t a sample size of one too small? 115
- Couldn’t a Cro-Magnon man have used the Doomsday argument? 116
- We can make the effect go away simply by considering a larger hypothesis space 116
- Aren’t we necessarily alive now? 118
- Sliding reference of “soon” and “late”? 119
- How could I have been a 16th century human? 119
- Doesn’t your theory presuppose that what happens in causally disconnected regions affects what happens here? 120
- But we know so much more about ourselves than our birth ranks! 120
- The Self-Indication Assumption — Is there safety in numbers? 122
- Chapter 8: Observer-relative chances in anthropic reasoning? 127
- Chapter 9: Paradoxes of the self-sampling assumption 141
- Chapter 10: Observation selection theory: a methodology for anthropic reasoning 159
- Building blocks, theory constraints and desiderata 159
- The outline of a solution 161
- SSSA: Taking account of indexical information of observer-moments 162
- Reassessing Incubator 165
- How the reference class may be observer-moment relative 168
- Formalizing the theory: the Observation Equation 172
- A quantum generalization of OE 174
- Non-triviality of the reference class: why R0 must be rejected 175
- A subjective factor in the choice of reference class? 181
- Chapter 11: Observation selection theory applied 185
- Cosmological theorizing: fine-tuning and freak observers 185
- The freak-observer problem places only lax demands on the reference class 193
- The Sleeping Beauty problem: modeling imperfect recall 194
- The case of no outsiders 195
- The case with outsiders 196
- Synthesis of the 1/2- and 1/3- views 198
- Observation selection theory applied to other scientific problems 198
- Robustness of reference class and scientific solidity 202
- Wrap-up 204
- Bibliography 207