In 1984 there was a big problem in the Soviet Union: the butterfly’s population declined because children were hunting on them with butterfly nets. To solve this problem, the Soviet government banned sales of such nets. I remember that one summer my parents were not able to buy me such a net.
Today it is obvious that this was not the biggest problem for the Soviet Union, which was facing its own existential catastrophe in just a few years. The same way, discussing now the moral value of insect may be an opportunity cost if we want to prevent x-risks. Anyway, let’s go.
Let’s look first on the number of ant’s observer-moments. One way to calculate them is the use of the number of insect’s facets in eye, which is 30 000 for dragonfly. Assuming binary vision in insects, it is 2power30 000 different images which an ant can see. Humans have 7 mln color vision cone cells in each eye, which imply 8power7000000 different possible images an human eye could see. This is 8power6990000 times more than ant’s possible observer states. Similar result could be achieved if we compare brain sizes in neurons of a human and an ant.
Good question about entropy. It could be also assumed that “normal” states of consciousness for humans are more diverse than for ants. “Normal states” are those which one experiences during his normal life, not under the effect of random generators combined with powerful hallucinogens. The less diverse species are in their experience, more likely these species to have exact copies of observer-moments between their specimen.
Another part of the enthropy question is the ability of a human (or an ant) to distinguish two states of his consciousness as different, probably by providing different reaction to them. In that case, humans enormously outperform ants, as we can give long textual descriptions of all nuances of our experiences. Those also could be calculated by combining the complexity of all possible human situations describing phrases with all typical reactions of an ant on new objects (here it is assumed that ants are only capable to typical reactions which may be not true).
Right, so if we’re using a uniform distribution over 2^30000, there should be exactly zero ants sharing observer-moments, so in order to argue that ants’ overlap in observer-moments should discount their total weight, we’re going to need to squeeze that space a lot harder than that.
I’ve also spent some time recently staring at ~randomly generated grids of color for an unrelated project, and I think there’s basically no way that the human visual system is getting so much as 5000 bits of entropy (i.e., 50x50 grid of four-color choices) out of the observer-experience of the visual field. So I think using 2^#receptors is just the wrong starting point. Similarly, assuming that neurons operate independently is going to give you a number in entirely the wrong realm of numbers entirely. (Wikipedia says an ant has ~250,000 neurons.)
I think that if you want to get to the belief that two ants might ever actually share an experience, you’re going to need to work in a significantly smaller domain, like your suggestion of output actions, though applying the domain of “typical reactions of a human to new objects” is going to grossly undercount the number of human possible observer-experiences, so now I’m back to being stuck wondering how to do that at all.
If we take multiverse view, there will be copies, but what we need is not actual copies, but a measure of uniqueness of each observer-moments, which could be calculated as a proportion of frequencies of copies—for humans and for ants.
The problem may be done more practical by asking how much computational resources we (future FAI) need to resurrect all possible humans and all possible ants.
Just some preliminary thoughts.
In 1984 there was a big problem in the Soviet Union: the butterfly’s population declined because children were hunting on them with butterfly nets. To solve this problem, the Soviet government banned sales of such nets. I remember that one summer my parents were not able to buy me such a net.
Today it is obvious that this was not the biggest problem for the Soviet Union, which was facing its own existential catastrophe in just a few years. The same way, discussing now the moral value of insect may be an opportunity cost if we want to prevent x-risks. Anyway, let’s go.
Let’s look first on the number of ant’s observer-moments. One way to calculate them is the use of the number of insect’s facets in eye, which is 30 000 for dragonfly. Assuming binary vision in insects, it is 2power30 000 different images which an ant can see. Humans have 7 mln color vision cone cells in each eye, which imply 8power7000000 different possible images an human eye could see. This is 8power6990000 times more than ant’s possible observer states. Similar result could be achieved if we compare brain sizes in neurons of a human and an ant.
Good question about entropy. It could be also assumed that “normal” states of consciousness for humans are more diverse than for ants. “Normal states” are those which one experiences during his normal life, not under the effect of random generators combined with powerful hallucinogens. The less diverse species are in their experience, more likely these species to have exact copies of observer-moments between their specimen.
Another part of the enthropy question is the ability of a human (or an ant) to distinguish two states of his consciousness as different, probably by providing different reaction to them. In that case, humans enormously outperform ants, as we can give long textual descriptions of all nuances of our experiences. Those also could be calculated by combining the complexity of all possible human situations describing phrases with all typical reactions of an ant on new objects (here it is assumed that ants are only capable to typical reactions which may be not true).
Right, so if we’re using a uniform distribution over 2^30000, there should be exactly zero ants sharing observer-moments, so in order to argue that ants’ overlap in observer-moments should discount their total weight, we’re going to need to squeeze that space a lot harder than that.
I’ve also spent some time recently staring at ~randomly generated grids of color for an unrelated project, and I think there’s basically no way that the human visual system is getting so much as 5000 bits of entropy (i.e., 50x50 grid of four-color choices) out of the observer-experience of the visual field. So I think using 2^#receptors is just the wrong starting point. Similarly, assuming that neurons operate independently is going to give you a number in entirely the wrong realm of numbers entirely. (Wikipedia says an ant has ~250,000 neurons.)
I think that if you want to get to the belief that two ants might ever actually share an experience, you’re going to need to work in a significantly smaller domain, like your suggestion of output actions, though applying the domain of “typical reactions of a human to new objects” is going to grossly undercount the number of human possible observer-experiences, so now I’m back to being stuck wondering how to do that at all.
If we take multiverse view, there will be copies, but what we need is not actual copies, but a measure of uniqueness of each observer-moments, which could be calculated as a proportion of frequencies of copies—for humans and for ants.
The problem may be done more practical by asking how much computational resources we (future FAI) need to resurrect all possible humans and all possible ants.