Regardless of what one thinks of your philosophy, I find your psychology ontologically interesting. It is interesting that a mind can end up in such a state, with such beliefs. Nonetheless, I believe in time and persistent personhood, as do most people, so most of humanity lacks the specific psychological impetus towards your philosophy, that comes from timelessness and depersonalization.
E.g. does it give the Rawlsian veil of ignorance an extra concreteness for you? It’s not just that you could have been any other person; there’s no persistent personhood which connects your actual person-moment more strongly to any others in an intrinsic way. On the level of personal identity (as opposed to causality), you are equally connected or disconnected from all other moments of consciousness.
Contrast that with a belief that time and change is real, and that one is a specific person persisting in time through a single stream of consciousness and unconsciousness… Under such circumstances, even if one regards oneself as a random sample from among all possible persons, nonetheless, you know you’re a particular person with a very specific circumstance, and all that you will ever experience personally is the future of that person. This easily leads to value systems in which one is only or primarily concerned with oneself.
On the other hand, I do have some logical sympathy to the thought of myself as a randomly sampled possible person. But it raises the question of how to deal with aspects of one’s situation that are very rare. Lots of descendants for humanity would imply we are unusually early in time; the alternative is the doomsday argument, for which I have no intellectual objections, so that’s OK. But what about just being conscious, and conscious of even this much of reality?
Whether or not you’re a panpsychist, beings with even an average human’s level of intelligence and consciousness ought to be ultra-rare in a universe where the vast majority of the entities are atoms and elementary particles drifting in space. So I can regard myself as a randomly sampled being from such a universe, that happened to win the existential lottery; or I could reject that model of the universe, in favor of one where the average entity has my degree of mental complexity. That can lead in a variety of exotic directions, but none of them has ever felt like an obviously correct replacement for my usual belief; so by default I lapse back into thinking of myself as a complex conscious being in a universe full of much simpler beings, and with this problem of typicality being unresolved.
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.
Comments on a few aspects:
Regardless of what one thinks of your philosophy, I find your psychology ontologically interesting. It is interesting that a mind can end up in such a state, with such beliefs. Nonetheless, I believe in time and persistent personhood, as do most people, so most of humanity lacks the specific psychological impetus towards your philosophy, that comes from timelessness and depersonalization.
E.g. does it give the Rawlsian veil of ignorance an extra concreteness for you? It’s not just that you could have been any other person; there’s no persistent personhood which connects your actual person-moment more strongly to any others in an intrinsic way. On the level of personal identity (as opposed to causality), you are equally connected or disconnected from all other moments of consciousness.
Contrast that with a belief that time and change is real, and that one is a specific person persisting in time through a single stream of consciousness and unconsciousness… Under such circumstances, even if one regards oneself as a random sample from among all possible persons, nonetheless, you know you’re a particular person with a very specific circumstance, and all that you will ever experience personally is the future of that person. This easily leads to value systems in which one is only or primarily concerned with oneself.
On the other hand, I do have some logical sympathy to the thought of myself as a randomly sampled possible person. But it raises the question of how to deal with aspects of one’s situation that are very rare. Lots of descendants for humanity would imply we are unusually early in time; the alternative is the doomsday argument, for which I have no intellectual objections, so that’s OK. But what about just being conscious, and conscious of even this much of reality?
Whether or not you’re a panpsychist, beings with even an average human’s level of intelligence and consciousness ought to be ultra-rare in a universe where the vast majority of the entities are atoms and elementary particles drifting in space. So I can regard myself as a randomly sampled being from such a universe, that happened to win the existential lottery; or I could reject that model of the universe, in favor of one where the average entity has my degree of mental complexity. That can lead in a variety of exotic directions, but none of them has ever felt like an obviously correct replacement for my usual belief; so by default I lapse back into thinking of myself as a complex conscious being in a universe full of much simpler beings, and with this problem of typicality being unresolved.
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.