Abstract
Beauty is put to sleep and woken up either once or twice, depending on the flip of a coin; after each waking, she will fall asleep and forget having woken. Upon waking, what should be her credence that the coin came up heads? Some say 1/2; others say 1/3. I propose that evidence supports a theory for you when your having that qualitative evidence would be more likely if the theory were true than if it were false. This view supports the “1/3” answer to the Sleeping Beauty problem. It also has applications to other arguments concerning self-locating beliefs: the Doomsday Argument fails, and the Fine Tuning Argument supports the Multiverse theory, if and only if it would be metaphysically possible for you to exist in a different universe.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
This is the view of Lewis (2001).
- 3.
This argument is defended by Elga (2000).
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- 5.
Davies 1983, chs. 12–13.
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- 9.
This example is from Leslie 1990, p. 70.
- 10.
Hacking (1987, pp. 33–4) makes the same point, using dice instead of a coin.
- 11.
Partisans of the multiverse have also claimed to have independent reasons for thinking there must be multiple universes (independent, that is, of the fine tuning evidence); see, e.g., Susskind 2006, ch. 11. I make no attempt to evaluate this claim; my concern is solely whether the fine tuning evidence on its own supports Multiple Universes.
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Manson and Thrush (2003, pp. 73–4) use this analogy to rebut the “this universe” objection.
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Manson and Thrush 2003, p. 74. I have modified the example slightly.
- 15.
If one wishes to count the identity of the decayed atom as part of the evidence, this results in a more complicated calculation for the posterior probability of there being many atoms in the box, but the answer will be the same. The key point: whether one or many atoms were in the box has no effect on Bob’s probability of decaying; however, the probability of Bob’s having been in the box when Bob decayed increases linearly with the number of atoms supposed to be in the box. Since the evidence tells you not only that Bob decayed but that Bob was in the box at the time, the evidence is rendered more probable by the Many Atoms hypothesis. So Many Atoms is confirmed.
- 16.
Manson and Thrush (2003, pp. 75–7) discuss this issue, inconclusively. My own sympathy for Cartesian dualism inclines me toward accepting the assumption. I don’t know what causally determines whether a given immaterial mind animates a given body, but whatever it is, I think it not unreasonable that a given mind could have animated a body in a different universe. But I cannot argue for all this here.
- 17.
The theories are not empirically equivalent; more evidence is needed to adjudicate between them. Multiverse predicts, roughly, that we should find ourselves to be fairly typical examples of the sort of conscious beings who would exist in a multiverse filled with universes with randomly chosen parameter values. Design predicts, instead, that we should find ourselves in a universe whose parameter values are especially suitable or good for life, even out of those sets of parameter values that permit life. These predictions can differ. E.g., Multiverse might lead us to expect the initial entropy of the universe to be approximately the highest that it could be, compatible with life later being likely to evolve; Design would probably lead us to expect a lower initial entropy, perhaps the minimal physically possible initial entropy.
- 18.
The reason is that they understand probabilities in terms of frequencies with which some type of outcome occurs in a large collective. See von Mises 1957, pp. 18–20, 28–9.
- 19.
More precisely, given a fixed history of the world prior to time t, the probability of your being born at t is independent of what occurs after t.
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Huemer, M. (2018). Self-Locating Beliefs. In: Paradox Lost. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90490-0_11
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