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Comment by manbash | Hacker News Reader

"you could have been born as" and the so-called "life-lottery" are a matter of philosophical and belief-system debate.

The "you" (or: self) is a concept, a perception.

I am just me, and couldn't have been something else, or born in another timeline, or to different parents.

To elaborate this point a bit: the "lottery" concept requires you to believe there's like a queue of souls and they each get allocated to different bodies, and you're lucky you got a fancy one instead of a microscopic shrimp. A different -- and to me, more plausible -- way to look at it is that "you" are an emergent property of a specific complex organism. How you actually emerge is a fascinating and difficult discussion, but putting aside the mechanics, the implication of this framing is that "you could have been a microscopic shrimp" is meaningless, like asking "what if that cloud were instead a bowl of soup?"

What would be the “me” if I were to clone myself 1:1? Would there be two “me”s? Or a the same old “me”, a single consciousness but two bodies?

Two consciousnesses with the same origin. What's wrong with that?

The philosophical zombie might be an interesting rabbit hole for you! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

That problem used to mindfuck me. Eventually I realized it's more of an emergent problem, that only exists in our brains. Problem goes away by taking a step back and viewing the world from a perspective greater than self.

I'm gonna be reborn as microplastics and live eternally.

Yes, but as a thought experiment it is considered by many as the only way to make unbiased decisions about moral principles and how society should be structured. Moral philosopher John Rawls's uses the terms original position and veil of ignorance. You can think of them as "What we'd all decide for the world if each of us did not know ahead of time which person they'd would be born as".

https://open.library.okstate.edu/introphilosophy/chapter/joh...

> The Veil is meant to ensure that people’s concern for their personal benefit could translate into a set of arrangements that were fair for everyone, assuming that they had to stick to those choices once the Veil of Ignorance ‘lifts’, and they are given full information again.

> One set of facts hidden from you behind the Veil are what we might call ‘demographic’ facts. You do not know your gender, race, wealth, or facts about your personal strengths and weaknesses, such as their intelligence or physical prowess. Rawls thought these facts are morally arbitrary: individuals do not earn or deserve these features, but simply have them by luck. As such, they do not deserve any benefits or harms that come from them. By removing knowledge of the natural inequalities that give people unfair advantages, it becomes irrational to choose principles that discriminate against any particular group.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/original-position/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position

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