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.
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.
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.
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
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.