Nirvana Rank (working post)

watermark
Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:54:34 GMT

not meant to be formal/rigorous - more stream of thought, I'm trying to think about anthropics more

I wanted to communicate a concept I'd like to call **Nirvana Rank** that I came up with when thinking about Anthropics and reference classes.

I'll cover some background

Anthropics is about reasoning from the fact that you're an observer of reality. It treats your own existence as evidence you can use to deduce things about the worlds you're in.

Within anthropics, people have clustered on two ways of treating your own existence as evidence:

The first is called the Self Sampling Assumption (SSA) - where you treat yourself as a random sample, a typical member from the space of actual observers that exist in your reference class.

The second is called the Self Indication Assumption (SIA) which considers yourself a sample from all *possible* observers. This means SIA considers uninstantiated counterfactual realities while SSA does not.

There's something called the Doomsday Argument which was a thought experiment that was downstream of accepting SSA.

The Doomsday Argument goes as follows:

Everyone who has lived and who will ever lived is assigned a "birth rank" denoting in what order they were born in. So the first person to come into existence is assigned a birth rank of 1, and so on.

Our universe can live to be quite long, yet we find ourselves, relatively speaking, at nearly the very beginning, with very low birth ranks.

If you accept SSA, then observing yourself with a low birth rank means that its a typical value. If humanity were to go on to last trillions of years and produce trillions of more descendants, why would our birth rank be so low?

It's far more likely, then, that humanity will not last that long, that our birth rank is low because humanity will soon undergo a catastrophe barring it from extending far into the future.

This is the Doomsday Argument.

There are likely existing refutations and modifications to the argument, but I wanted to present a thought I had, which may modify SSA and dispel the argument.

Part of that includes noting an observation about what reference class one is allowed to assume they are sampled from. Your reference class is the space you count as valid to consider yourself a sample of. In the Doomsday Argument, the reference class was all of humanity from the first born to the last one standing. You're a random sample from that.

Consider the following very simple very gruesome scenario. If you choose to kill yourself tonight, then tomorrow, 10 trillion trillion people will be born on several thriving exoplanets. Are you a random observer amongst yourself and those 10 trillion trillion people?

The answer is of course not - the existence of those people are conditioned on your nonexistence - you could never be sampled from them.

While this is obvious, the point of the scenario is to point out with an extreme case, that it's possible for some reference classes to be barred from yourself through the use of a conditional which serves as a barrier or filter.

Many sets of reference classes may appear at first glance to be valid for one to be sampled from - but who's membership demands a conditional be made which would ultimately modify you as an observer! On the other side of such conditional gates would be thought forms inaccessible to you.

Its entirely possible you've crossed conditional gates barring others once in a valid reference class from considering you a potential referent.

One can imagine a reference class where all members are grouped by having the same conditional gates they've walked through, and sharing the same conditional gates not-yet-opened - creating a landlocked region of logical access.

I'd like to imagine such a reference class is sharing a cycle of incarnation, on some kind of path to enlightenment ideal where there are no more conditional gates ahead, and all have been opened.

It felt like it'd be like achieving some kind of cognitive singularity, becoming omniscient, or attaining Nirvana and ultimate wisdom.

It felt like a shared cycle of incarnation because the reference class included the same solved conditional gates and had the same conditional gates to eventually pass through.

Members in this special reference class need not be located in the same period of time or be locally near one another. There is a direction of progress, perhaps - something like the direction towards Nirvana.

Everyone in the same cycle of incarnation would share what I would call **Nirvana Rank** (as opposed to Birth Rank, from the Doomsday Argument.) I don't think the concept is so clean, but that's fine.

With Birth Rank, you're privileging a particular ordering, a particular form of distance: order of births, and distance from the first one (or perhaps from the last one). One's Birth Rank marks their progress along an uninspiring journey that is less related to observation or experience itself, and more related to something as arbitrary as temporal positioning.

Why do I refer to the Birth Rank as a marker along a *journey*?

Well, presumably we don't like the conclusions of the Doomsday Argument because we would like to *get to* the far future surviving and thriving in some way. Or we would like to *get to* a blossoming population of a space faring civilization. We care about our typicality because we care about this journey, and where we would like to go.

However, I do not believe it is Birth Rank which tracks the journey we as observers would like to go on - though it could be a proxy (a larger Birth Rank may be far in the future which may be nice!).

With **Nirvana Rank**, the values, if it were easy to assign, would mark progress on unlocking new regions of thought space or observation space based on passing through conditional gates. If we are dead or lose our cognitive and emotional potential, then that would be associated with a low **Nirvana Rank**. As implied by the name, it's the observers' journey through potential experiences until one reaches an exclusive reference class that's nevertheless very enriching in the quality of observations accessible.

One may care about their typicality along *this* journey, hoping to be further along, or hoping not to be doomed to wander into an irreversible low Nirvana Rank reference class.

In the Doomsday Argument, SSA has you sampled from observers spanning from the very first Birth Rank to the very last.

It would be a bit different with the Nirvana Rank - you would not be sampled from the space of observers from Nirvana Rank 0 to ~Nirvana itself. Recall that this reference class was constructed with conditional gates which created boundaries between other observers and those in your reference classes. There are essentially levels you exist within and are sampled from - and those levels share a range of Nirvana Ranks.

Like in the Doomsday Argument, you should then expect to find yourself as a typical member of your incarnation cycle reference class - having a typical Nirvana Rank, *within that level*.

If the Doomsday Argument implied that catastrophe must be soon, then its analog here may imply that one is soon to exit their incarnation cycle to one with higher Nirvana Ranks!

Now, to estimate how soon this transition occurs requires a reference for one of the lower Nirvana Ranks in your incarnation cycle (this would be analogous to the reference point observer with Birth Rank 0).

For example, if you're typical within your incarnation cycle, and of your reference class, the lowest Nirvana Rank observer is not so much lower than yours, then perhaps you should expect to face the conditional gates ahead of you soon and anticipate upgrading your Nirvana Rank.

To recap:

- Presumably, one cares about the typicality of their Birth Rank in the Doomsday Argument because there's a preference for observations to last into the far future, because that would likely be associated with longevity and utopia

- Choice of ordering or classifying observers should reflect what one would prefer, since you'd want to know if your typicality implies something preferable through anthropic arguments

- Birth Rank doesn't satisfy this perfectly, it's an easy choice, but not the best one

- It's possible to satisfy conditionals that put you in a once inaccessible reference class of observers, or make a reference class which is inaccessible to you now

- This ability of conditionals to create boundaries or gates among reference classes can be used to construct a special kind of reference class, where members share the conditional gates they've moved past as well as the conditional gates they have yet to move past and resolve

- These remind me of incarnation cycles - shared observation powers, shared limitations in their extent are reminiscent of being somewhere similar on something like a 'spiritual journey'

- If resolving conditionals can take one to exclusive but expressive and rich reference classes, there can be something like an ordering or path of these classes towards some ideal - maybe one where the reference class is composed of neigh-omniscient minds, the enlightened, cognitive singularities - the term Nirvana Rank was coined to represent distance from such states, though not as clean a concept as Birth Rank

- This sounds like a journey that would be worthwhile for observers to flow through, making it compelling to care about one's typicality amongst the reference class

- The conditional gates form landlocked logical pockets, the fact that some resolved conditionals will grant more access to more possible observations suggests an ordering or path or journey - you've got pockets and you've got progress

- One cannot be sampled from observers outside one's pocket by definition of how such pockets are constructed - so one is a typical member of a pocket, not across all Nirvana Ranks

Hopefully you want yourself and others to reach something like enlightenment . Choice of reference class should match that goal.

Discuss