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Show HN: The Lottery of Life

claude.ai

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Re: Show HN: The Lottery of Life

#21

Post by applfanboysbgon »

rollulus wrote: post #18
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #11

I've thought about this a lot in the past, and it seems like the strongest argument for our existence being a simulation. What are the odds of being born a human and not a bacteria, a fly, or, apparently, a nematode? What are the odds that I would be born into a wealthy country? 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…

Your thinking is flawed. It seems to assume that you were pulled from a pool of souls and got assigned to an organism somewhere in time. That’s not the case. What makes you “you” is nothing but your brain cells.

I'm not talking about souls or anything like that. 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. How many organisms lived on Earth in the last 4 billion years? Some foo-illion, where foo is some prefix that I cannot even conceptualise, some number so large that it is far beyond my brain's ability to comprehend. It's difficult to accept that I, or any human, won such an incomprehensible lottery.

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.

Re: Show HN: The Lottery of Life

#22

Post by rollulus »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #21
rollulus wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your thinking is flawed. It seems to assume that you were pulled from a pool of souls and got assigned to an organism somewhere in time. That’s not the case. What makes you “you” is nothing but your brain cells.

I'm not talking about souls or anything like that. 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. How many organisms lived on Earth in the last 4 billion years? Some foo-illion, where foo is some prefix that I cannot even conceptualise, some number so large that it is far beyond my brain's ability to comprehend. I…

You repeat the same mistake here:

> 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%.

Re: Show HN: The Lottery of Life

#23

Post by kaihong_deng »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #19

This probability is drawing proportional to organism counts, instead of brain cell counts. 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 i…

[dead]

Re: Show HN: The Lottery of Life

#25

Post by threatofrain »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #19

This probability is drawing proportional to organism counts, instead of brain cell counts. 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 i…

Identity is statistical propensity… does the framing of illusion actually do anything here?

Re: Show HN: The Lottery of Life

#26

Post by iceflinger »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #21
rollulus wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your thinking is flawed. It seems to assume that you were pulled from a pool of souls and got assigned to an organism somewhere in time. That’s not the case. What makes you “you” is nothing but your brain cells.

I'm not talking about souls or anything like that. 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. How many organisms lived on Earth in the last 4 billion years? Some foo-illion, where foo is some prefix that I cannot even conceptualise, some number so large that it is far beyond my brain's ability to comprehend. I…

The only reason you can even introspect or ponder this stuff at all is on the substrate of your human language. It's no sense to make this analogy with other forms on life on earth when there are plenty of your fellow humans who rolled much worse odds than you. The more disappointing part is how the humans who rolled good odds don't seem to want to do much about this.

Re: Show HN: The Lottery of Life

#27

Post by aagha »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #11

I've thought about this a lot in the past, and it seems like the strongest argument for our existence being a simulation. What are the odds of being born a human and not a bacteria, a fly, or, apparently, a nematode? What are the odds that I would be born into a wealthy country? 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…

People will come up with any and all reasons to keep from believing in God.

> 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.

Re: Show HN: The Lottery of Life

#28

Post by DoctorOetker »

threatofrain wrote: post #25
DoctorOetker wrote: post #19

This probability is drawing proportional to organism counts, instead of brain cell counts. 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 i…

Identity is statistical propensity… does the framing of illusion actually do anything here?

basically one could ask oneself:

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.

Re: Show HN: The Lottery of Life

#29

Post by satisfice »

aagha wrote: post #27
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #11

I've thought about this a lot in the past, and it seems like the strongest argument for our existence being a simulation. What are the odds of being born a human and not a bacteria, a fly, or, apparently, a nematode? What are the odds that I would be born into a wealthy country? 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…

People will come up with any and all reasons to keep from believing in God. > 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.

I don’t need a reason not to believe in God. It’s an incoherent idea. Even you don’t know what it means.

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.

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