Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T05:34:57.147Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

9 - Puzzles of Self-Locating Belief

from Part III - Testing Multiverse Theories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2021

Simon Friederich
Affiliation:
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands
Get access

Summary

The self-sampling assumption can be seen as an indifference principle of self-locating belief: it instructs us to treat all the possibilities that might be in the reference class of observers as equally likely. Indifference principles of self-locating belief are regarded as suspect by some philosophers because they appear to have paradoxical consequences. Notably, an indifference principle of self-locating belief is usually appealed to in the notorious Doomsday Argument, and it also plays a role in the derivation of apparent “anomalous causal powers” in Nick Bostrom's Adam and Eve thought experiments. The recommendation that we should sometimes act as if there were anomalous causal powers seems very hard to accept. I show that reasoning akin to that used in the Doomsday Argument and in the Adam and Eve thought experiments leads to a similar recommendation in a version of the famous Sleeping Beauty problem. All these unattractive recommendations can be avoided if, as required by the BIC, one pays careful attention to the background evidence based on which one assigns probabilities to competing hypotheses and chooses the observer reference class in accordance with that background evidence.

Type
Chapter
Information
Multiverse Theories
A Philosophical Perspective
, pp. 132 - 152
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×