Imagine a factory that assigns souls to animals. A clerk draws a ticket, checks the assignment, and sends you down the appropriate conveyor belt. Given how badly other animals outnumber us, most tickets would send you somewhere with fewer career prospects. Somehow, you got the human ticket. If everyone had an equal chance, how lucky was that?1

The Paradox

The paradox rests on three assumptions:

  • There are separate conscious beings.

  • Most of them are not human.

  • Each gets an equal chance in the draw.

There are a few ways to respond.

  • Luck. Every ticket has the same chance, and you happened to get a human one. That remains possible. But the more humans are outnumbered, the more luck it requires.

  • No Separate Tickets. Perhaps asking which mind you could have been is already a mistake. Or perhaps all conscious lives belong to one subject. That changes the picture, although it still leaves the question of why this particular experience is human.2

  • Different Weights. A human and a rat each get a ticket, but the tickets have different chances of being drawn. Something about their conscious experiences could give one more weight than the other.

Mind Mass

A brain on one side of a weathered balance scale outweighs a crowd of animals on the other, against a dark, smoky background.

Maybe the lottery gives different kinds of minds different chances. A human and a rat are both conscious,3 but their experiences could carry very different weights. Call each being’s weight in the lottery mind mass.4 That weight might depend on how much a being experiences, how its experiences fit together, or something else about consciousness entirely. If ours is a thousand times a rat’s, we get a thousand times the chance. This could make being human much less surprising. The extra weight has to compensate for being outnumbered.

Counting conscious beings gives us a headcount, but it leaves out what’s happening inside each head. Different animals perceive, remember, and imagine the world in different ways. Perhaps some of those differences affect the odds of being one rather than another. Giving everyone an equal chance is an assumption too.

The Odds

A heatmap showing that our extra mind mass must compensate for how much we are outnumbered. The chance of being human reaches 50 percent when our average mind-mass advantage equals the number of other conscious beings per human. Values are hypothetical.
Mind Mass And The Odds. The extra weight has to compensate for being outnumbered. At a billion to one, even a millionfold mind-mass advantage leaves only about a 0.1 percent chance of being human. These are hypothetical comparisons.

Of course, even a big advantage over a rat would only get us so far. There are a lot of rats, along with all the other conscious animals. A modest advantage could disappear in that crowd. For this explanation to work, our mind mass would have to be large enough that we account for a substantial share of the total, even though there are relatively few of us.

Suppose there are a thousand other conscious beings for every one of us. If our average mind mass is a thousand times theirs, the two groups carry equal total weight. The chance of being human is then 50 percent. With equal tickets, it would be about one in a thousand. We could be badly outnumbered and still have had pretty good odds.

References

  1. Nick Bostrom, Anthropic Bias, on probabilities about which conscious being you are.
  2. Daniel Kolak, I Am You, on the idea that all conscious lives belong to one subject.
  3. The New York Declaration On Animal Consciousness.
  4. The phrase “mind-mass” also appears in Bernhard Riemann's philosophical writing, with a different meaning. Andrew Bell, Bryn Davies, and Habib Ammari discuss it in Bernhard Riemann, The Ear, And An Atom Of Consciousness.