Why am I Me?

Exactly, it has always felt wrong to me to treat being “me” as a random sample of observers. I couldn’t be anyone except me. If the future has trillions of humans or no humans, the person which is me will feel the same way in either case. I find the doomsday argument absurd because it treats my perspective as a random sample, which feels like a type error.

Suppose when you are about to die, time freezes, and Omega shows up and tells you this: "I appear once to every human who has ever lived or will live, right when they are about to die. Answer this question with yes or no: are you in the last 95% of humans who will ever live in this universe? If your answer is correct, I will bring you to this amazing afterlife that I've prepared. If you guess wrong, you get nothing." Do you say yes or no?

Let's look at actual outcomes here. If every human says yes, 95% of them get to the afterlife. If every human says no, 5% of them get to the afterlife. So it seems better to say yes in this case, unless you have access to more information about the world than is specified in this problem. But if you accept that it's better to say yes here, then you've basically accepted the doomsday argument.

However, an important thing to note is that when using the doomsday argument, there will always be 5% of people who are wrong. And those 5% will be the first people who ever lived, whose decisions in many ways have the biggest impact on the world. So in most situations, you should still be acting like there will be a lot more people in the future, because that's what you want the first 5% of people to have been doing.

More generally, my procedure for resolving this type of confusion is similar to how this post [LW · GW] handles the Sleeping Beauty problem. Basically, probability is in the mind, so when a thought experiment messes with the concept of "mind", probability can become underspecified. But if you convert it to a decision problem by looking at the actual outcomes and rating them based on your preferences, things start making sense again.

I don't actually see the argument here, just assertions. The assertions are: there's no reason why you are who you are; and, you shouldn't regard yourself as a typical conscious being. 

Well, you are who you are, because of the causes that made you; and you're either a typical conscious being or an atypical conscious being. I don't see the problem. 

You can rewrite the doomsday question into more objective terms: "given evidence that N people have previously come into existence, what update should be made to the credence distribution for the total number of people to ever come into existence?"

In coherence arguments [LW · GW], we deal with many alternative situations, or thought experiments, asking what is to be done in each of them, considered separately from all the other situations. Presenting any one situation can be taken as a form of updating from some shared prior state on the situation's description, or on an observation of it, or on the newly presented state of knowledge of it. This is different from ordinary updating that follows a worldline and proceeds in order; instead, the updates that put the point of view in one of these situations happen independently of each other.

In this framing, an anthropic update on the birth rank makes sense, even as it would be much less central as an ordinary observation. It can successfully fail to mention anything else that an actual human would otherwise know, so that the resulting state of mind will have large gaps in its knowledge of the world. The point of the procedure is to go from a statement of what the birth rank is to some posterior state of mind that describes the situation, captures the given facts, but no more facts than that.

And clearly this is a strange place to stop, without going further to elicit a utility function, or to find an updateless strategy [LW · GW]. Yet that's what anthropics tends to be about, building up a context that's sensitive to technical details that can go unmentioned, motivated by conflicting desiderata from other pursuits that are considered out of scope, and leaving it at that.

I feel like I'm still the same person as I was before I learned how many humans were born earlier than me. I think that's all you need for the Doomsday Argument to go through.

Take the Doomsday Argument(DA) as an example. It proposes the uninformed prior of one's own birth rank among all human beings ought to be uniformly distributed from the 1st to the last. So learning our actual birth rank (we are around the 100 billionth) should shift our belief about the future toward earlier extinction. E.g. I am more likely to be the 100 billionth person if there are only 200 Billion humans overall rather than 200 Trillion. So the fact I'm the 100 billionth means the former is more likely.

This is not how DA goes. It goes like this: if we are just as likely to be any particular observer, then the probability of being born at any particular time period is proportional to how many observers are alive at that time period. So, on the most outside-ish view (i.e., not taking into account what we know about the world, what we can predict about how the future is going to unfold etc), we should assign the most probability mass to those distributions of observers over history, where the time we were born had the most observers, which means that in the future there's going to be fewer observers than right now, probably because of extinction or something.

Also, if you assume the number of people alive throughout history is "fixed" at 200 billion "you" are just as likely to be the first person as the 100 billionth and 200 billionth. If you predict to be the 100 billionth, you can at best minimize the prediction error/deviation score [LW · GW].

The Doomsday Argument presupposes that we are drawn from a probability distribution over time as well as space - which I am not sure that I believe, though it might be true. I think we probably experience time sequentially across "draws" as well as within draws, assuming that there are multiple draws.

(I lean towards there being multiple draws, I don't see why there would only be one, since consciousness seems pretty fundamental to me and likely something that just "is" for any given moment in time. But some might consider this to be too spiritualistic; I'd retort that I consider annihilation to be too spiritualistic as well.)

I do think we are probably drawn from a distribution that weights something like "consciousness mass" proportional to probability mass. So, chances are you are probably going to be one of the smartest things around. This is pretty good news if true - it should mean, among other things, that there probably aren't really large civilizations in the universe with huge populations of much smarter beings.

this claim is not really relevant for the doomsday argument, you only need the random sampling of the index of someone, you use you, because you are random choice. it doesn't matter that you can't be another you.

this claim can be interesting regarding SIA, but even there i don't think it holds, but it will be more interesting and nuance.   

Just to make sure I understand your argument, it seems that you (dadadarren) actually disagree with the statement "I couldn't be anyone except me" (as stated e.g. by Eccentricity in these comments), in the sense that you consider "I am dadadarren" a further, subjective fact.  Is that right?  (For reference / how I interpret the terms, I've written about such questions e.g. here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10670-018-9979-6)

But then I don't understand why you think a birth-rank distribution is inconceivable.  I agree any such distribution should be treated as suspect, which probably gives you most of what you need for your argument here, in particular that the Doomsday Argument is suspect.  But I don't see why there would necessarily be some kind of impenetrable curtain between objective and subjective reasoning; subjective facts are presumably still closely tied to objective facts.  And it even seems to make sense to discuss about purely subjective facts between subjects -- e.g., discussions about qualia are presumably meaningful at least to some extent, no?
 

For now, I see no reason to deviate from the simple explanations to the problems OP posited.

Why am I me?

Well, "am" (an individual being someone), "I" and "me" (the self) are tricky concepts. One possible way to bypass (some of) the trickiness is to consider the alternative: "why am I not someone else"?

Well, imagine for a moment that you are someone else. Imagine that you are me. In fact, you've always been me, ever since I was born. You've never thought "huh, so this is what it feels like to be someone else". All you've ever thought is "what would it be like to be someone else?". Then one day you tried to imagine what it would be like to be the person who wrote an article on LessWrong and...

Alakazam, now you're back to being you. My point here is that the universe in which you are not you, but someone else, is exactly like our universe, in every way. Which either means that this is already the case, and you really are me, and everyone else too, or that those pesky concepts of self and identity actually don't work at all.

Regarding anthropic arguments, if I understand correctly (from both OP's post and comments), they don't believe that they are a n=1 sample randomly taken from the population of every human to ever exist. I think they are. Are they an n=1 sample of something? Unless the post was written by more than one person, then yes. Are they a sample taken from the population of all humans to ever exist? I do think OP is human, so yes. Are they a randomly selected sample? This is where it gets interesting.

If both your parents were really tall, than you weren't randomly selected from the population of all humans in regards to height. That is because even before measuring your height, we had reason to believe you would grow up to be tall. Your sampling was biased. But in regards to "when you were born", we must ask if there is any reason that we should think OP's birth rank leans one way or another. I can't think of one -- unless we start adding extra information to the argument. If you think the singularity is close and will end Humanity, then we have reason to think OP is one of the last few people to be born. If you think Humanity has a large chance of spreading through the Galaxy and living for eons, than we have reason to think the opposite. But if we want to keep our argument "clean" from outside information, then OP's (and our) birth rank should not be considered special. And it certainly wasn't deliberately selected by anyone beforehand. So yes, OP is a n=1 sample randomly taken from the population of all humans to ever exist, and therefore can do anthropic reasoning.

That doesn't necessarily mean the Doomsday argument is right though. I feel like there might me hidden oversimplifications in it, but I won't try to look for them now. The larger point is that anthropic reasoning is legitimate, if done right (like every other reasoning).

Today is raining and asking "why?" is a mistake because I am already experiencing rain right now, and counterfactual me isn't me?

It seems to me explanation is confused in such a way as to obscure decision making process of which questions are useful to consider.

The possibility of re-incarnations, or even the possibility of co-incarnations, would shift the odds, and the whole perspective on your question. Wouldn't it?

Both "I" and "me" are referencing the same thing. So the question "Why am I me?" is similar to "Why 1=1?" By definition. It's just a tautology but it feels like there is something more to it due to conflict between different models people use.

I completely agree about anthropic reasoning. It's indeed based on the assumption that we are randomly selected from a distribution. And all the weird cases, as far as I understand, happen when this assumption is wrong.

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

Benj Hellie's vertiginous question asks why, of all the subjects of experience out there, this one—the one corresponding to the human being referred to as Benj Hellie—is the one whose experiences are live? (The reader is supposed to substitute their own case for Hellie's.)

This question has already been answered. Intuitively, you can ask "why am I a human instead of a fish?"