4 ms·
Other than the fact that you can't coherently reason based on your own existence (existence is not a predicate), one should rightfully be wary of an argument th
by dogecoinbase 12y ago
Other than the fact that you can't coherently reason based on your own existence (existence is not a predicate), one should rightfully be wary of an argument that would have been valid and false at every point in the past.
The Doomsday Argument is not an argument in favor of its conclusion -- it's a reductio ad absurdum that demonstrates why this type of reasoning is invalid.
- andybak 12y agoIs this not a weakness in many (all?) deductive arguments? i.e. if we throw out this argument then we have to throw out much of science.
- dogecoinbase 12y agoIn a general sense, I don't believe so. While "there exists an experimenter" is an inherent assumption in many deductive chains, there's no attempt to use the existence of the experimenter as a prior in a Bayesian calculation. The logical flaw in the DA comes when you say "I, the reasoner, am likely to exist at a random point in the history of humanity", because the reasoning could not take place without your existence and therefore the hypothesis is not-falsifiable (no matter when in the history of humanity the reasoning occurred).
- marcosdumay 12y agoScience (the way that it's practiced nowadays) has no ambition to reach logical truths. It just collects empirical validation.