This article defends the Doomsday Argument, the Halfer Position in Sleeping Beauty, the Fine-Tuning Argument, and the applicability of Bayesian confirmation theory to the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics. It will argue that all four problems have the same structure, and it gives a unified treatment that uses simple models of the cases and no controversial assumptions about confirmation or self-locating evidence. The article will argue that the troublesome feature of all these cases is not self-location but selection effects.
I have had helpful exchanges with dozens of people on the material in this article over the years. For discussion of recent predecessors of this article I am grateful to Huw Price, Mike Titelbaum, audiences at the universities of British Columbia, CCNY, Delaware, Manchester, St. Andrews, Sydney, and York, and two referees for this journal. Support for this project was provided by a PSC-CUNY award, jointly funded by the Professional Staff Congress and the City University of New York.
The text of this article is only available as a PDF.
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.© 2012 by Cornell University
2012
