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Comment by kkoncevicius | Hacker News Reader

No no, I disagree, these are very different things.

The matter I am made of is nothing special - everything has same kind of matter so I am bound to have some of it. But the consciousness I have is very special - top shelf in all of biology.

Say bacteria are conscious. Here is how special this is: the number of bacteria on earth is estimated to be "five million trillion trillion". And there are ~7 billion humans. So the chance that I randomly end up as human, instead of bacteria is ~ 0.0000000000000000000001. And that is disregarding all other creatures.

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It sounds like you're suggesting that you are a "soul" that was "put" in a body.

Try to see it from this perspective; your experience as an individual (soul) is a feature of the structure we call Homo sapiens. It's a characteristic of this species' brain structure, in the same way that the colors of a flower are characteristic of its phenotype.

It would be silly to ask, "What are the chances that that shade of yellow ended up on that particular daffodil?"

The notion of "you" being in a "body" is extremely difficult to shake. Even if it's intellectually approachable, understanding it intuitively is something else entirely, though certainly attainable through sustained meditative practice or a hearty dose of psychedelics.

Yes but - I am that consciousness. That makes all the difference between this comparison and the yellow color example.

The fact that I am "seated" in a human body is an argument for only humans having this feature or phenotype called consciousness, and against the "consciousness is everywhere".

There's no paradox here. When a lottery is drawn, someone has to win it and be left with the question "what are the odds?". Well, the odds that there will be a lottery winner in a position to ask that question is 1.

If someone wins a lottery we can then say "what are the chances of this specific person winning - they are very low" - that would be Texas sharpshooter fallacy, because the chance of _some_ person winning somewhere is high, we simply drew a target around the winner and restated the question.

But this is not what is happening. What is happening is more like you finding three tickets under your rug in the morning, checking the numbers and finding out that you won jackpots in all three, and then choosing to believe that they are winner tickets by chance (believing in consciousness is everywhere) as opposed to someone planting them there (only humans are conscious or some other similar explanation).

The key difference between the two is that in the second case there are no multiple possibilities - it's about one person - you, you either win or loose, so we cannot select "winners" after the fact in this case.

I think you're making a good point, but anthropic reasoning is hard so I'm still mulling it over.

What you're saying is that panpsychism implies a lower probability of you ending up as you, because you may have ended up as a conscious bacteria instead.

I'm going to tentatively disagree with that because the counterfactual of you ending up as a bacteria instead of a human is impossible, and therefore it doesn't factor into the probability estimates. Whether a bacteria can be conscious is besides the point. I may be committing some kind of Monty Hall fallacy, but don't currently think so.

The Veil of Ignorance is false if we're talking about physical reality.

The argument I am pondering over here is very similar to the one about human population, you might have heard about it, it goes something like this: "human population is now likely highest it will ever be and will be drastically reduced in the future, because if we were to be born as any human randomly we would likely be born during a period where there are highest number of people alive".

Sadly I don't remember the name of it, but this argument about consciousness is in the same fashion. Except the odds are a _lot_ more surprising when compared with the population argument.

It's the Doomsday Argument and I can see how you're applying the same logic.

Doesn't this logic also imply that solipsism is true? 1 observer is less than 7 billion observers and therefore more likely under the logic of the Doomsday argument.

Thank you for naming it, now I can see if there are criticism of the doomsday argument that also apply.

And I do see how this can lead to solipsism. In particular when combined with "Self-Indication Assumption: The possibility of not existing at all" [1] . Solipsism would be a theory that explains both - the doomsday original argument and this criticism.

But I haven't thought much about that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument#Self-Indicat...

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