Is 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.
Re:A Primer on the Doomsday Argument
by dogecoinbase on Monday August 18, 2014 @02:50PM
(#8193931)
In 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).
Re:A Primer on the Doomsday Argument
by marcosdumay on Monday August 18, 2014 @06:08PM
(#8194988)
Science (the way that it's practiced nowadays) has no ambition to reach logical truths. It just collects empirical validation.
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.