Well, thank you for your interest! Yes, the veil of ignorance feels more concrete to me. The problem of the rarity of my consciousness seems solvable by an argument similar to the classical anthropic principle. Only sufficiently complex and intelligent beings would even wonder how improbable it is to find themselves so complex and intelligent. I would have a much higher chance of being an ant, but as an ant, I wouldn’t be asking this question in the first place.
As for why I don’t find myself as a complex consciousness from the Future, I would expect the Future to be more homogeneous—perhaps dominated by a single AI and its forks, an unconscious AI, or an AI generating many primitive consciousnesses optimized for pleasure, which wouldn’t need complexity or intelligence. If I were superintelligent, I would likely stop asking this question as well, considering it an anthropic truism so old and irrelevant that it’s not even worth bringing up. So, in that sense, I’m not particularly surprised to find myself as I am.
Well, thank you for your interest! Yes, the veil of ignorance feels more concrete to me. The problem of the rarity of my consciousness seems solvable by an argument similar to the classical anthropic principle. Only sufficiently complex and intelligent beings would even wonder how improbable it is to find themselves so complex and intelligent. I would have a much higher chance of being an ant, but as an ant, I wouldn’t be asking this question in the first place.
As for why I don’t find myself as a complex consciousness from the Future, I would expect the Future to be more homogeneous—perhaps dominated by a single AI and its forks, an unconscious AI, or an AI generating many primitive consciousnesses optimized for pleasure, which wouldn’t need complexity or intelligence. If I were superintelligent, I would likely stop asking this question as well, considering it an anthropic truism so old and irrelevant that it’s not even worth bringing up. So, in that sense, I’m not particularly surprised to find myself as I am.