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Yvain comments on It's not like anything to be a bat - Less Wrong
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That's an interesting observation.
There's a problem in assuming that consciousness is a 0/1 property; that you're either conscious, or not.
There's another problem in assuming that YOU are a 0/1 property; that there is exactly one atomic "your consciousness".
Reflect on the discussion in the early chapters of Daniel Dennet's "Consciousness Explained", about how consciousness is not really a unitary thing, but the result of the interaction of many different processes.
An ant has fewer of these processes than you do. Instead of asking "What are the odds that 'I' ended up as me?", ask, "For one of these processes, what are the odds that it would end up in me, rather than in an ant?"
According to Wikipedia's entry on biomass, ants have 10-100 times the biomass of humans today.
According to Wikipedia's list of animals by neuron count, ants have 10,000 neurons.
According to that page, and this one, humans have 10^11 neurons.
Information is proportional not to the number of neurons, but to the number of patterns that can be stored in those neurons, which is likely somewhere between N and N^2. I'm gonna call it NlogN.
I weigh as much as 167,000 ants. Each of them has ~ 10,000 log(10,000) bits of info. I have ~ 10^11 log(10^11) bits of info. I contain as much information as 165 times my body-mass worth of ants.
So if we ignore how much longer ants have lived than humans, the odds are better that a random unit of consciousness today would turn up in a human, than in an ant.
(Also note that we can only take into account ants in the past, if reincarnation is false. If reincarnation is true, then you can't ask about the chances of you appearing in a different time. :) )
If you're gonna then say, "But let's not just compare ourselves to ants; let's ask about turning up in a human vs. turning up in any other species", then you have the dice-labelling problem argued below: You're claiming humans are the 1 on the die.
I'm not following your math here, and I'm especially not following the part where if a person contains as much information as 165 ants and there are 1 quadrillion ants and ~ 10 billion people, a given unit of information is more likely to end up in a human than in an ant. And since we do believe reincarnation is false, it's much worse than that, since ants have been around longer than humans.
Also, I have a philosophical objection with basing it on units consciousness. If we're to weight the chances of being a certain animal with the number of bits information they have, doesn't that imply we're working from a theory where "I" am a single bit of information? I'd much sooner say that I am all the information in my head equally, or an algorithm that processes that information, or at least not just a single bit of it.
Oops; that was supposed to say, "I contain as much information as 165 times my body-mass in ants".
I'm kinda disappointed that your objection was that the math didn't work, and not that I'm smarter than 165 ants. (I admit they are winning the battle over the kitchen counter. But that's gotta be, like, 2000 ants. Don't sell me short.)
If you want to say that you're all the information in your head equally, then you can't ask questions like "What are the odds I would have been an ant?"