When reasoning about self-locating belief, one should reason as if one were a randomly selected bit of information. This principle can be considered to be an application of Bostrom’s Strong Self-Sampling Assumption(SSSA)[2] according to which one should reason as if one were a randomly selected element of some suitable reference class of observer-moments. The reference class is the class of all...

In the recent article 'Conflict between anthropic reasoning and observa-tion' (gr-qc/0303070) Ken D. Olum, using some inflation-based ideas and the anthropic premise that we should be typical among all intelligent observers in the Universe, arrives at the puzzling conclusion that 'we should find ourselves in a large civilization (of galactic size) where most observers should be, while in fact w...

Even when completely and consistently formulated, a fundamental theory of physics and cosmological boundary conditions may not give unambiguous and unique predictions for the universe we observe; indeed inflation, string/M theory, and quantum cosmology all arguably suggest that we can observe only one member of an ensemble with diverse properties. How, then, can such theories be tested? It has ...

The Fine-Tuning Argument (FTA) is a variant of the Design Argument for the existence of God. In this paper the evidence of fine-tuning is explained and the Fine-Tuning Design Argument for God is presented. Then two objections are covered. The first objection is that fine-tuning can be explained in terms of the existence of multiple universes (the ‘multiverse’) plus the operation of the anthropi...

Recently a covariant entropy conjecture has been proposed for dynamical horizons. We apply this conjecture to concordance cosmological models, namely, those cosmological models filled with perfect fluids, in the presence of a positive cosmological constant. As a result, we find this conjecture has a severe constraint power. Not only does this conjecture rule out those cosmological models disfav...

The problem of interpreting quantum theory on a large (e.g. cosmological) scale has been commonly conceived as a search for objective reality in a framework that is fundamentally probabilistic. The Everett programme attempts to evade the issue by the reintroduction of determinism at the global level of a “state vector of the universe”. The present approach is based on the recognition that, like...