“Why was I born as myself rather than someone else?” versus “Why do I think I was born as myself rather than someone else?”
This never got solved in the comments.
I was sitting in microeconomics class in twelfth grade when I asked myself, “Why am I me? Why am I not Kelsey or David or who-have-you?” Then I remembered that there are no souls, that ‘I’ was a product of my brain, and thus that the existence of my mind necessitates the existence of my body (or something that serves a similar function). Seeing the contradiction, I concluded that I had reasoned, incoherently, as if ‘I’ were an ontologically fundamental mental entity with some probability of finding itself living some particular lives. That’s unsurprising, because as a great deal of cognitive science and Eliezer’s free will solution has demonstrated, humans often intuitively evaluate ‘possibility’ and plausibility by evaluating how easy it is to conceive of something, as a proxy. “I can conceive of ‘being someone else,’ thus there must be some probability that I ‘could have been someone else’, so what is the distribution, what is its origin, and what probability does it assign to me being me?”
There are also the many bizarre conclusions you can draw from the assumption that the mind you find yourself as was drawn from a probability distribution, such as the doomsday argument.
Well, the problem with the Doomsday Argument is not the probability distribution, as I see it, but the assumption that we are “typical humans” with a typical perspective. If you think that the most likely cause for the end of humanity would be predictable and known for millennia, ferex, then the assumption does not hold, as we currently do not see a for-sure-end-of-humanity in our future.
Like you said, it is conceivable that we could have been someone else, thus it is natural to at least flesh out the possible conclusions that can be reached from that assumption.
If “which mind you find yourself as” was indeed drawn from a probability distribution, then it is natural to believe that our observations about our consciousness are not too far from the mode, and are unlikely to be outliers. And yet, something that I have found surprising since childhood, I seem to find myself as a human mind, in a world where human minds seem to be the most intelligent and “most conscious” out of all the types of minds we find on Earth. This would seem tremendously lucky if it really were possible that we could have been born as something else. Humans are far from the most numerically abundant type of animal.
And so perhaps you would speculate that it could have only been possible to be another human mind, as these minds are the easiest to conceive of being. If you were born as a random human out of all humans that have ever and will ever exist, assuming a uniform distribution, then there is an X% chance you are in the last X% of humans who will ever live. This is a fairly disturbing thought. If you are roughly the 60 billionth human, there is a 50% chance that there will only be ~60 billion more humans. This is the “doomsday paradox.” Even if you allocate some probability mass to minds that are not human, you still run into variations of doomsday paradoxes. If the universe will last for trillions of years, then it should be fairly disconcerting that we find ourselves towards the beginning of it, and not during some flourishing interstellar empire with trillions of intelligent minds.
Another possibility is that the distribution is not over time, but only a function of time. In that case, we still have to explain why our experience is likely. Maybe the probability mass is not uniform over all minds, but more mass is allocated to minds that are capable of a greater “amount” of conscious experience. In that case, we would have to conclude that human minds probably have the greatest “capacity” for consciousness, of all minds that currently exist. If that is the case, then we would be surprised to observe any superintelligent aliens, for example (and so far we haven’t).
I think it is interesting that the assumption that we could have been a different mind seems to allow us to constrain our expectations about what we observe. I don’t particularly hold such a viewpoint, but it is worth considering the logical conclusions in my opinion.
This never got solved in the comments.
I was sitting in microeconomics class in twelfth grade when I asked myself, “Why am I me? Why am I not Kelsey or David or who-have-you?” Then I remembered that there are no souls, that ‘I’ was a product of my brain, and thus that the existence of my mind necessitates the existence of my body (or something that serves a similar function). Seeing the contradiction, I concluded that I had reasoned, incoherently, as if ‘I’ were an ontologically fundamental mental entity with some probability of finding itself living some particular lives. That’s unsurprising, because as a great deal of cognitive science and Eliezer’s free will solution has demonstrated, humans often intuitively evaluate ‘possibility’ and plausibility by evaluating how easy it is to conceive of something, as a proxy. “I can conceive of ‘being someone else,’ thus there must be some probability that I ‘could have been someone else’, so what is the distribution, what is its origin, and what probability does it assign to me being me?”
There are also the many bizarre conclusions you can draw from the assumption that the mind you find yourself as was drawn from a probability distribution, such as the doomsday argument.
Well, the problem with the Doomsday Argument is not the probability distribution, as I see it, but the assumption that we are “typical humans” with a typical perspective. If you think that the most likely cause for the end of humanity would be predictable and known for millennia, ferex, then the assumption does not hold, as we currently do not see a for-sure-end-of-humanity in our future.
Can you break that down to the extent that I broke down my confusion above? I’m having a hard time seeing deep similarities between these problems.
Like you said, it is conceivable that we could have been someone else, thus it is natural to at least flesh out the possible conclusions that can be reached from that assumption.
If “which mind you find yourself as” was indeed drawn from a probability distribution, then it is natural to believe that our observations about our consciousness are not too far from the mode, and are unlikely to be outliers. And yet, something that I have found surprising since childhood, I seem to find myself as a human mind, in a world where human minds seem to be the most intelligent and “most conscious” out of all the types of minds we find on Earth. This would seem tremendously lucky if it really were possible that we could have been born as something else. Humans are far from the most numerically abundant type of animal.
And so perhaps you would speculate that it could have only been possible to be another human mind, as these minds are the easiest to conceive of being. If you were born as a random human out of all humans that have ever and will ever exist, assuming a uniform distribution, then there is an X% chance you are in the last X% of humans who will ever live. This is a fairly disturbing thought. If you are roughly the 60 billionth human, there is a 50% chance that there will only be ~60 billion more humans. This is the “doomsday paradox.” Even if you allocate some probability mass to minds that are not human, you still run into variations of doomsday paradoxes. If the universe will last for trillions of years, then it should be fairly disconcerting that we find ourselves towards the beginning of it, and not during some flourishing interstellar empire with trillions of intelligent minds.
Another possibility is that the distribution is not over time, but only a function of time. In that case, we still have to explain why our experience is likely. Maybe the probability mass is not uniform over all minds, but more mass is allocated to minds that are capable of a greater “amount” of conscious experience. In that case, we would have to conclude that human minds probably have the greatest “capacity” for consciousness, of all minds that currently exist. If that is the case, then we would be surprised to observe any superintelligent aliens, for example (and so far we haven’t).
I think it is interesting that the assumption that we could have been a different mind seems to allow us to constrain our expectations about what we observe. I don’t particularly hold such a viewpoint, but it is worth considering the logical conclusions in my opinion.