I'm not yet seeing that other peoples' consciousness per se is relevant here. All that matters is that there be a vast pool of potential winners, conscious or otherwise. All that I (the winner, say) observed was that one of the members of this pool won.
If my prior belief had been that every member of the pool had an equal probability of winning, then I have no new evidence for the holodeck hypothesis after I observe my winning as opposed to any other member's. I would have predicted in advance that some member of the pool would win that week, and that's what I saw.
However, I take your point to be that it would not be rational to suppose that there were millions and millions of potential winners, each with an equal chance of winning. So, I now concede that initially there is a certain asymmetry between the lottery winner and a non-winner: The non-winner initially has stronger evidence that he or she was among the pool of potential winners, and that the odds of winning were distributed evenly throughout that pool. Of course, the winner has strong evidence for this, too. But I agree that the non-winner's evidence is initially even stronger.
However, I disagree that these respective bodies of evidence are incommunicable, as Eliezer claimed. If I, the winner, observe you, the non-winner, sufficiently closely, then I will eventually have as much evidence as you have that you were a potential winner who had the same chance that I had. (And if it matters, I will eventually have as much evidence as you have that you are conscious. I side with Dennett in denying you an in-principle privileged access to your own consciousness.)
In the event that you win, you gain the information that a conscious person has won the lottery. When someone else wins, you merely gain the information that a "person" who may or may not be conscious has "won the lottery".
The holodeck hypothesis predicts that interesting events are more likely to happen to conscious persons. Since you know that you are conscious, if you receive more than your fair share of interesting events, this seems to be (rather weak, but still real) evidence for the holodeck hypothesis.
...I will eventually have as
In passing, I said:
And lo, CronoDAS said:
To which I replied:
There's a certain resemblance here - though not an actual analogy - to the strange position your friend ends up in, after you test the Quantum Theory of Immortality.
For those unfamiliar with QTI, it's a simple simultaneous test of many-worlds plus a particular interpretation of anthropic observer-selection effects: You put a gun to your head and wire up the trigger to a quantum coinflipper. After flipping a million coins, if the gun still hasn't gone off, you can be pretty sure of the simultaneous truth of MWI+QTI.
But what is your watching friend supposed to think? Though his predicament is perfectly predictable to you - that is, you expected before starting the experiment to see his confusion - from his perspective it is just a pure 100% unexplained miracle. What you have reason to believe and what he has reason to believe would now seem separated by an uncrossable gap, which no amount of explanation can bridge. This is the main plausible exception I know to Aumann's Agreement Theorem.
Pity those poor folk who actually win the lottery! If the hypothesis "this world is a holodeck" is normatively assigned a calibrated confidence well above 10-8, the lottery winner now has incommunicable good reason to believe they are in a holodeck. (I.e. to believe that the universe is such that most conscious observers observe ridiculously improbable positive events.)
It's a sad situation to be in - but don't worry: it will always happen to someone else, not you.