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wnoise 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.
No, it's proportional to the log of the number of patterns that can be (semi-stably) stored. E.g. n bits can store 2^n patterns.
I'd like to see a lot more justification for this. If each connection were binary (it's not), and connections were possible between all N neurons (they're not), than we would have N^2 bits.
Oops! Correct. That's what I was thinking, which is why I said info NlogN for N neurons. N neurons => max N^2 connections, 1 bit per connection, max N^2 bits, simplest model.
The math trying to estimate the number of patterns that can be stored in different neural networks is horrendous. I've seen "proofs" for Hopfield network capacity ranging from, I think, N/logN to NlogN.
Anyway, it's more-than-proportional to N, if for no other reason than that the number of connections per neuron is related to the number of neurons. A human neuron has about 10,000 connections to other neurons. Ant neurons don't.