Suppose the gods create either one person or two persons (in succession). You find yourself newly created, and with no reason to prefer the one-person hypothesis H1 to the two-person hypothesis H2, so you assign them each a credence of 1/2. The gods now tell you that you are the first person created; call this evidence E1. You reason as follows: if H1 is true, then I was bound to be the first person created, whereas if H2 is true it was equally likely that I would be the second person created. That is, P(E1|H1) = 1 and P(E1|H2) = 1/2. Then by a simple application of Bayes’s theorem, P(H1|E1) = 2/3 and P(H2|E1) = 1/3. That is, the evidence that I am the first person created confirms H1 over H2
CITATION STYLE
Lewis, P. (2010). A note on the Doomsday Argument. Analysis, 70(1), 27–30. https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anp139
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