Why does one example matter? The Doomsday argument is over billions of people (something like >100b so far), so one immortal—who doesn’t even exist—shows nothing. He’s wrong a few hundred times, so what—your immortal adds nothing at all to just pointing out that Romans or cavemen would’ve been wrong.
Shouldn’t it be either over all lifeforms or only over people who’ve heard and are able to appreciate the Doomsday argument?
so one immortal—who doesn’t even exist—shows nothing
The example of the immortal is just a trick helpful of thinking about individual lives as not especially meaningful to probabilities in an external sense. Your brain loses cognition and memory, its atoms eventually become part of many other people—in a sense, we’re all this “immortal”—is it meaningful in a mathematical sense to label one particular “life” and say “I was born early” or “I was born late”?
I don’t know. I admit myself just confused over all this.
Why does one example matter? The Doomsday argument is over billions of people (something like >100b so far), so one immortal—who doesn’t even exist—shows nothing. He’s wrong a few hundred times, so what—your immortal adds nothing at all to just pointing out that Romans or cavemen would’ve been wrong.
Shouldn’t it be either over all lifeforms or only over people who’ve heard and are able to appreciate the Doomsday argument?
The example of the immortal is just a trick helpful of thinking about individual lives as not especially meaningful to probabilities in an external sense. Your brain loses cognition and memory, its atoms eventually become part of many other people—in a sense, we’re all this “immortal”—is it meaningful in a mathematical sense to label one particular “life” and say “I was born early” or “I was born late”?
I don’t know. I admit myself just confused over all this.