I have suggested that one possible solution of the Boltzmann brain problem is that the universe is decaying at an astronomical rate, making it likely to decay within 20 billion years. A problem with this suggestion is that it seems to require unnatural fine tuning in the decay mechanism that would not be explained anthropically. Here it is pointed out that if a spacetime version of volume avera...

It is shown how thinking in terms of the protocol used can help clarify problems related to anthropic reasoning, such as the Doomsday Argument and the Sleeping Beauty Problem. There is a complex of problems related to anthropic reasoning, the Doomsday Argument [Leslie 1996] and the Sleeping Beauty Problem [Elga 2000] perhaps chief among them, that have generated a great deal of heat in the phil...

This article examines how imaginaries of security in the Anthropocene function at Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), otherwise known as ‘Doomsday Vault’. Recent explorations by scholars have suggested that different ways seeing, understanding, acting in, and imagining world are necessary to adequately respond complex crises Anthropocene. The dissolution nature/culture divide existential risk fr...

A broad class of dark energy models, which have been proposed in attempts at solving the cosmological constant problems, predict a late time variation of the equation of state with redshift. The variation occurs as a scalar field picks up speed on its way to negative values of the potential. The negative potential energy eventually turns the expansion into contraction and the local universe und...

The Doomsday argument and anthropic arguments are illustrations of a paradox. In both cases, a lack of knowledge apparently yields surprising conclusions. Since they are formulated within a Bayesian framework, the paradox constitutes a challenge to Bayesianism. Several attempts, some successful, have been made to avoid these conclusions, but some versions of the paradox cannot be dissolved with...

The n-universes are a methodological tool the scope of which proves to be general and which find to apply in the thought experiments underlying philosophical problems. The n-universes have been introduced in Franceschi (2001) in the context of the study of Goodman's paradox and described in more detail in Franceschi (2002), in the context of their application to the paradoxes related to the Doo...

/ \ s k p i sk people about pandemic influenza and you'll likely hear a variety of , responses ranging from those who don't believe it is a real problem to those who envision a doomsday scenario. The truth is that it is prudent to plan for a pandemic occurrence. Faith-based and community-based organizations (FBCOs) are essential partners both in preparations for an influenza pandemic and in pro...