For now, I see no reason to deviate from the simple explanations to the problems OP posited.
Why am I me?
Well, “am” (an individual being someone), “I” and “me” (the self) are tricky concepts. One possible way to bypass (some of) the trickiness is to consider the alternative: “why am I not someone else”?
Well, imagine for a moment that you are someone else. Imagine that you are me. In fact, you’ve always been me, ever since I was born. You’ve never thought “huh, so this is what it feels like to be someone else”. All you’ve ever thought is “what would it be like to be someone else?”. Then one day you tried to imagine what it would be like to be the person who wrote an article on LessWrong and...
Alakazam, now you’re back to being you. My point here is that the universe in which you are not you, but someone else, is exactly like our universe, in every way. Which either means that this is already the case, and you really are me, and everyone else too, or that those pesky concepts of self and identity actually don’t work at all.
Regarding anthropic arguments, if I understand correctly (from both OP’s post and comments), they don’t believe that they are a n=1 sample randomly taken from the population of every human to ever exist. I think they are. Are they an n=1 sample of something? Unless the post was written by more than one person, then yes. Are they a sample taken from the population of all humans to ever exist? I do think OP is human, so yes. Are they a randomly selected sample? This is where it gets interesting.
If both your parents were really tall, than you weren’t randomly selected from the population of all humans in regards to height. That is because even before measuring your height, we had reason to believe you would grow up to be tall. Your sampling was biased. But in regards to “when you were born”, we must ask if there is any reason that we should think OP’s birth rank leans one way or another. I can’t think of one—unless we start adding extra information to the argument. If you think the singularity is close and will end Humanity, then we have reason to think OP is one of the last few people to be born. If you think Humanity has a large chance of spreading through the Galaxy and living for eons, than we have reason to think the opposite. But if we want to keep our argument “clean” from outside information, then OP’s (and our) birth rank should not be considered special. And it certainly wasn’t deliberately selected by anyone beforehand. So yes, OP is a n=1 sample randomly taken from the population of all humans to ever exist, and therefore can do anthropic reasoning.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the Doomsday argument is right though. I feel like there might me hidden oversimplifications in it, but I won’t try to look for them now. The larger point is that anthropic reasoning is legitimate, if done right (like every other reasoning).
For now, I see no reason to deviate from the simple explanations to the problems OP posited.
Well, “am” (an individual being someone), “I” and “me” (the self) are tricky concepts. One possible way to bypass (some of) the trickiness is to consider the alternative: “why am I not someone else”?
Well, imagine for a moment that you are someone else. Imagine that you are me. In fact, you’ve always been me, ever since I was born. You’ve never thought “huh, so this is what it feels like to be someone else”. All you’ve ever thought is “what would it be like to be someone else?”. Then one day you tried to imagine what it would be like to be the person who wrote an article on LessWrong and...
Alakazam, now you’re back to being you. My point here is that the universe in which you are not you, but someone else, is exactly like our universe, in every way. Which either means that this is already the case, and you really are me, and everyone else too, or that those pesky concepts of self and identity actually don’t work at all.
Regarding anthropic arguments, if I understand correctly (from both OP’s post and comments), they don’t believe that they are a n=1 sample randomly taken from the population of every human to ever exist. I think they are. Are they an n=1 sample of something? Unless the post was written by more than one person, then yes. Are they a sample taken from the population of all humans to ever exist? I do think OP is human, so yes. Are they a randomly selected sample? This is where it gets interesting.
If both your parents were really tall, than you weren’t randomly selected from the population of all humans in regards to height. That is because even before measuring your height, we had reason to believe you would grow up to be tall. Your sampling was biased. But in regards to “when you were born”, we must ask if there is any reason that we should think OP’s birth rank leans one way or another. I can’t think of one—unless we start adding extra information to the argument. If you think the singularity is close and will end Humanity, then we have reason to think OP is one of the last few people to be born. If you think Humanity has a large chance of spreading through the Galaxy and living for eons, than we have reason to think the opposite. But if we want to keep our argument “clean” from outside information, then OP’s (and our) birth rank should not be considered special. And it certainly wasn’t deliberately selected by anyone beforehand. So yes, OP is a n=1 sample randomly taken from the population of all humans to ever exist, and therefore can do anthropic reasoning.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the Doomsday argument is right though. I feel like there might me hidden oversimplifications in it, but I won’t try to look for them now. The larger point is that anthropic reasoning is legitimate, if done right (like every other reasoning).