Anthropic bias
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Anthropic bias, coined by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, is the bias arising when "your evidence is biased by observation selection effects". This is, basically an extreme generalisation of the confirmation bias and the cognitive bias, involving not only mind-set, memory and methodology, but the whole way in which one sees oneself as an entity investigating an environment. As the etymology of the term suggests (from the Greek word for "human being", ἄνθρωπος (ánthrōpos)), Bostrom's main claim could be reduced to saying that being a human being itself constitutes a bias for, and consequently a hindrance to, objective observation.
Contents |
[edit] Background
The original statement of the problems related to anthropic bias is due to Eugene Wigner's 1960 paper, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences". He noted that being a human on one planet was not a bias that could be easily overcome, and noted the necessity of considering the point of view of other, less "anthropic", species.
A more rigorous statement of these problems is that of George Lakoff and Rafael E. Núñez. According to a case study of theirs, Euler's Identity itself expresses an anthropic bias, embedded in human cognition, and investigatable only via cognitive science — which relies on empirical methods. This necessarily leaves some uncertainty which, according to Lakoff, can't be overcome even in theory. Thus, anthropic bias is due to cognitive bias, and investigating it leads to yet another cognitive bias.
[edit] Bostrom's theory
Bostrom thinks otherwise and suggests a way out using what amounts to quasi-empirical methods. In his book Anthropic Bias: observation selection effects in science and philosophy [1], Bostrom explores the implications of these for "polling, cosmology (how many universes are there?), evolution theory (how improbable was the evolution of intelligent life on our planet?), the problem of time's arrow (can it be given a thermodynamic explanation?), game theoretic problems with imperfect recall (how to model them?), traffic analysis (why is the "next lane" faster?)."
One conclusion is that the anthropic principle or rather the many competing concepts that claim that name, are confused. He further claims that "existing methodology does not permit any observational consequences to be derived from contemporary cosmological theories, in spite of the fact that these theories quite plainly can be and are being tested empirically by astronomers. What is needed to bridge this methodological gap is a more adequate formulation of how observation selection effects are to be taken into account."
He acknowledges a limit to the approach, as an "element of subjectivity that may reside in the choice of a prior credence function for indexical propositions. We compare it with the more widely recognized aspect of subjectivity infesting the non-indexical component of one's credence function, and we suggest that the issue throws light on how to rank various applications of anthropic reasoning according to how scientifically rigorous they are."
[edit] Criticism
It has been suggested that the whole idea of an anthropic bias is irrefutable. How could a criticism, presumably made by a human being, against the theory of anthropic biases be conceived? If it is not possible to review it critically, the whole theory is without any practical consequences for our human lives here on Earth.
Another problem with the theory purporting the existence of a general anthropic bias, is that it sounds self-referentially inconsistent — If Nick Bostrom is a human being, and the anthropic principle is valid, then his observations will be biased; the anthropic principle is an observation made by Nick Bostrom; hence, either (α) Nick Bostrom is not a human being (or alternatively, knowledge of the anthropic principle was supernaturally revealed to him), or (β) the anthropic principle is itself anthropically biased, or (γ) at least one observation made by a human being (e.g. N.B.'s observation of the anthropic bias) is not biased (γ is a counterexample of the general anthropic principle, and all three alternatives (α, β, and γ) point to Bostrom's theory being poorly conceived)[citations needed].
[edit] References
- Eugene Wigner, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences", Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, vol. 13, no. I (February 1960), [2]
- George Lakoff and Rafael E. Núñez: Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being, Basic Books, 2000
- Nick Bostrom: Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy, Routledge, 2002 [3]
