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Yvain comments on It's not like anything to be a bat - Less Wrong
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Given 10 billion bats , that bats have been around for 50 million years, and bat generations taking let's say 5 years, and assuming that population has been stable for evolutionary history, we have a super rough estimate of something on the order of (10B * (50M/5)) = 100 quadrillion historical bats. I think a lot of anthropic calculations assume there have been 100 billion historical humans, so probability of being a human is 1/1 millionth the probability of being a bat.
I don't see a whole lot of difference between not having subjective experiences and having one one-millionth the subjective experience of a human. Once we expand this to all animals instead of just bats, the animals come out even worse.
I'm not sure it follows that a bat has one one-millionth the subjective experience of a human. The problem is that you can't necessarily add a bunch of bat-experiences together to get something equivalent to a human experience; in fact, it seems to me that this sort of additivity only holds when the experiences are coherently connected to each other. (If someone hooked up a million bat-brains into a giant network, then it might make sense to ask "Why am I a human, rather than a million bats"?)
So it may be, for instance, that each bat has 10% the subjective experience of a human, but that that extra 90% makes it millions of times more probable that the experiencer will be pondering this question.
Is there a difference between having no subjective experience and having one-millionth the subjective experience of a Tra'bilfin, which are advanced aliens with artificially augmented brains capable of a million times the processing of a current human?
You don't have any issues quantifying over fractions of subjective experience? I haven't begun to have a clear idea what that even means.