anthropic-principle.com

Welcome! Here you will find both popular overviews and scholarly material on everything related to observation selection effects, the anthropic principle, self-locating belief, and associated applications and paradoxes in science and philosophy.

Prof Nick Bostrom: Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford University

CONTENTS

Primer - So what's this all about? - One place to start.

Self-Location and Observation Selection Theory - A more advanced introduction.

Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2002) - Five full sample chapters are now available for free as well as information about how to order the book.

Preprint Archive - Research papers by many authors. Covers observation selection effects in general and applications to: the Doomsday argument, cosmology, evolutionary biology, the simulation argument, fine-tuning, design arguments, thermodynamics and time's arrow, the Sleeping Beauty problem, SETI, and quantum physics.

FAQ - A brief intro to the Doomsday argument and answers to a some common questions.

Profiles - A few of the researchers in this field.

Links - Related sites.

Bibliography - For rainy days; quite comprehensive up until the year 2000.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Prof Nick Bostrom is Director of the Future of Humanity Institute in the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University. He has previously held positions as at Yale University and as a British Academy postdoctoral fellow. His doctoral dissertation, which was selected for inclusion in the Outstanding Dissertations series by the late Prof. Robert Nozick, developed the first mathematically explicit theory of observation selection effects. He has published more than 140 articles in both philosophy and physics journals. He is the author of Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2002). You can visit his homepage at http://www.nickbostrom.com.