Show HN: The Lottery of Life
claude.ai
claude.ai
You had a random chance at being born anywhere in the world weighted by population. A big lesson from the game is if you are born in Africa and you survive childhood, your best bet is somehow immigrating to the West
Would it not be more representative if the weighting included neuron counts?
In a sense I ascribe to the belief of such a lottery, except that we are all the same "I", we just alternatively wake up as physics evaluating the progress for this or that electron, proton etc in this or that rock or neuron and progressing the state indeterministically according to the rules of physics.
Our identity is a pragmatic illusion (just like the illusion that water is a continuus medium, is a pragmatic one, as it helps summarize the behavior of water).
Imagine an amnesiac elder in an elderly home, still knows the rules of chess, but can't form long term memories any more: its his turn, and he's playing black, there is a small notebook with his plans and strategies, jotted down during the earlier turns, he makes some notes and then a move.
The caretakers turn around the chess board, swap the black notebook with the white notebook and leave the amnesiac bewildered for a few minutes. Then he reads his earlier notes in the white notebook, deliberates his options and makes a move, with a white piece.
The caretakers turn the chess board around again.
This is physics, and the "player" is you, me, everyone, and we are physics.
The notebook is the state of your brain, and your move is indeterminate physics (with deterministic probabilities) evolving the state of the universe.
Does identity exist: yes! as a pragmatic summary, even natural selection latched onto this illusion out of necessity.
Weighting by neurons will be more representative, of universal experience in the earthly biosphere.
given that our brain is composed of many neurons
and given that a company is composed of many employees
or a nation state composed of many agents;
why then is our subjective experience (which we can not prove to others, but of which most of us are convinced that everyone has) such that I perceive my environment at the level of a single brain, and not at the level of a single neuron and not at the level of a nation state aware of all the state secrets etc.
Why don't I subjectively experience as if I were a single neuron, with neighbor neurons in this brain?
Why don't I perceive as if I am a nation state?
Natural selection feeds back at the level of a genome, so it has evolved to optimize information transfer primarily within a single organism, not constrained within a single neuron, and more private than sharing all knowledge across brains.
To another extent one could say it's an illusion due to historically biological feedback, but phrased differently due to a lack of technology to clone mental states, pause them, fork, rewind to an earlier state etc. Once technology becomes capable of preserving, digitizing and emulating brain states, this concept of identity will blur, 2 forked instances of the same mental state would remember the same PIN code and other credentials. It will become possible to merge (say with consent) 2 digitized brain states, smoothly by adding connections between the neurons of one and the other, increasing data bandwidth, and making memories a shared concept. 2 mental states could talk over a low bandwidth for ages to communicate what things they have observed during a separation (say spies catching up), or they could do this near instantaneously by merging their mental state, drastically increasing survival rates because situational awareness can advance immediately.
a digital mental state could encounter a fork in a road, decide to fork into A and B, each explore one leg of the fork, and then meet up again and merge the experiences.
The only thing that gives me pause is that if this is a simulation, the beings that created it are evil for creating both a world so full of suffering and a simulation so detailed (from my own perspective) that we fully experience such suffering. For what purpose could simulations like this possibly serve, I wonder. Does it entertain such hypothetical higher beings, in the way that we create murder simulations to entertain ourselves? Or is it somehow informative, although we'd expect the simulation to be much lower resolution than the universe it's being run in? Maybe we're just in some random gambler or forecaster's model, which is not wholly accurate but with sufficient fidelity may gain a couple of percentage points in predictive power.
Particularly combined with our setting. We've just developed world-destroying weapons, and resources are running out - the environment is being destroyed, water reserves are being depleted, our society is built on non-renewable resources that will run out in the next couple of hundred years at the latest, all things which could lead to the use of such weapons. Plus we live in a novel time, with unbelievable speed of new discoveries and interesting things happening, in contrast to the billions of years of nothing much interesting happening. If you were going to create a simulation, isn't an interesting simulation like this exactly what you'd create, whether for entertainment or research?
And if it is a simulation, the odds of living such an interesting existence go up. Potentially by a Fooillion-fold multiplier. How many simulations have we run here in our short time having computing technology? Now imagine how many simulations higher beings could run, over a longer timescale. Our odds of existing in one of those interesting simulations is so much higher than this being an un-simulated universe where we just happened to be born in an immensely interesting time where the fate of civilization itself is at stake and could foreseeably end in 50 or 500 years.
> I'm simply talking about the simple improbability of, out of all possible lives I could have had, mine being one this relatively comfortable and novel.
That implies that there is a separate organism and an “I” (I used the word soul for that) and that the two were assigned to each other. No, the two are the same. And the probability of you being you is 100%.
If you're having that thought and expressing it on the internet ... 100% certainty.
In a similar many worlds conjecture, with an infinite number of potential universes with an infinite combination of fundemental physical constants, what are the odds that I'm here in this, one of the only possible universes with a sweet spot of values that allow life?
Observer bias is a thing.
> As for those who dis-believe, it makes no difference whether you warn them or not: theywill not believe. God has sealed their hearts and their ears, and theireyes are covered. They will have great torment.
You probably imagine some Santa Claus character on a throne. But I don’t know which God I should be imagining? Athena? Indra? The All Spirit? Spaghetti Monster?
State the thesis clearly, then present your evidence.
You've never seen a black hole, nor--even with visualizations we have today--could you likely comprehend one if you saw it.
"God" is a vague fantasy, invented by the first people and slightly updated as technology changed. It has been made concrete, yes, but in many different and irreconcilable ways since the dawn of human imagination. So you can't just "believe in God." You believe in some particular version of "God." And that version is probably dictated by whatever your parents believed, rather than by the actual state of reality.
[1] Today this is described as a metaphor by Christians, but that's obvious cope. Before we scientifically disproved the possibility of anything like this happening, this was historically regarded as something that literally happened by the Church. It would be a fucking stupid metaphor, anyways. If you interact with humans to impart your teachings only twice, which mankind is expected to uphold for thousands of years and use as the source of their morality, maybe do a better job of being a role model than all the "metaphorically" evil shit you did in Genesis.
Well you probably have to be a human to ask yourself that so it seems fallacious to argue like that.
> What are the odds that I would be born into a wealthy country?
10% maybe?
> What are the odds that I would be born into what appears to be the end of history -- the most prosperous species in the most prosperous time of Earth's 4 billion year history of life, where I can live comfortably, but technology has created multiple civilization-ending threats that will probably come into fruition shortly after I am gone (should I be so lucky)?
Since the human population is at a peak currently, probably not that bad. From a quick google search it looks like only about 110 billion people ever existed and there are currently 8 billion people alive so the chance of being alive currently given you’re a random human is about 7%.
And also I don’t think human civilization will end in the foreseeable future. Climate change is going to lead to some changes but overall humans aren’t even close to going extinct.
Update: so now I learned something about compounding as well as about nematodes. Prob is about 0.03, much more than I’d have guessed.