4 ms·

Can you clarify? You find the probability that you are human, conditional on already being human, to be too small to accept?

kkoncevicius 6y ago
Not quite - I find the hypothesis for "consciousness is everywhere" to be too hard to accept based on the observation that I ended up as human (assuming that humans are somehow "higher" than other being of course). Or stated a bit fancier - the p-value of the null "consciousness is everywhere" is astronomically small, given this observation of me ending up as a human.
- hntrader 6y ago
  I think this is confusing conscious entities with anthropic observers. Ants might be conscious but that doesn't mean that they count as anthropic observers. The probability that you are someone who is capable of asking the question you've asked is 1.
- jstanley 6y ago
  But you can forget consciousness and ask the same question. The chances that the matter you're made of ended up making you is astronomically small compared to it just being random space dust or something. And yet it happened. I think it's just selection bias.
  - kkoncevicius 6y ago
    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.
    - captainclam 6y ago
      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.
      - kkoncevicius 6y ago
        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".
    - hntrader 6y ago
      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.
      - kkoncevicius 6y ago
        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.

kkoncevicius 6y ago

Not quite - I find the hypothesis for "consciousness is everywhere" to be too hard to accept based on the observation that I ended up as human (assuming that humans are somehow "higher" than other being of course). Or stated a bit fancier - the p-value of the null "consciousness is everywhere" is astronomically small, given this observation of me ending up as a human.

hntrader 6y ago
I think this is confusing conscious entities with anthropic observers. Ants might be conscious but that doesn't mean that they count as anthropic observers. The probability that you are someone who is capable of asking the question you've asked is 1.
jstanley 6y ago
But you can forget consciousness and ask the same question. The chances that the matter you're made of ended up making you is astronomically small compared to it just being random space dust or something. And yet it happened. I think it's just selection bias.
- kkoncevicius 6y ago
  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.
  - captainclam 6y ago
    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.
    - kkoncevicius 6y ago
      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".
  - hntrader 6y ago
    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.
    - kkoncevicius 6y ago
      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.