SilasBarta 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.
Humans are more analogous to an ant colony than to an individual ant, so that's where you should make the comparison: to a number of ant colonies with ant mass equal to your mass. Within each colony, you should treat each ant as a neuron in a large network, meaning you multiply the ant information not by the number of ants Na, but by Na log Na.
Assume 1000 ants/colony. You weight as much as 167 colonies. Letting N be the number of neurons in an ant (and measuring in Hartleys to make the math easier), each colony has
(N log N) (Na log Na)
= (1e4 log 1e4) (1e3 log 1e3) = 1.2e8 H
Multiplying by the number of colonies (since they don't act like a mega-colony) gives
1.2e8 H * 167
=2e10 H
This compares with the value for humans:
1e11 log 1e11
1.1e12 H
So that means you have ~55 times as much information per unit body weight, not that far from your estimate of 165.
I don't know what implications this calculation has for the topic, even assuming it's correct, but there you go.
Good point!