Defeating Dr. Evil with Self-locating Belief

Check out this collegiate paper in the PhilSci archives at Pitt. A funny and easy-to-read missive on the subject of Decision Theory, it discusses a possible Philisophical defense against Austin Powers’s mortal enemy.

Dr. Evil learns that a duplicate of Dr. Evil has been created. Upon learning this, how seriously should he take the hypothesis that he himself is that duplicate? I answer: very seriously. I defend a principle of indifference for self-locating belief which entails that after Dr. Evil learns that a duplicate has been created, he ought to have exactly the same degree of belief that he is Dr. Evil as that he is the duplicate. More generally, the principle shows that there is a sharp distinction between ordinary skeptical hypotheses, and self-locating skeptical hypotheses.

Posted by etrigan at November 25, 2003 7:20 AM