“I am randomly selected from all animals” I don’t endorse this claim. It implies that my essence is prior to my existence, and I disagree with this assumption. I do believe I was once a soul placed into a random body within a set.
My essence follows from my existence, if I was different I would be someone else. I do stand by the claim, “I can reason as if I am randomly selected from all animals” this is true for any set I am a part of, if you did select a random member of that set I am a possible result, some sets just give unintuitive results, but that’s simply because reasoning from a particular positionality only gives part of the picture.
Anthropic shadow only requires the later epistemic claim to be valid and is not dependent on the metaphysical claim.
I didn’t try to make any metaphysical claims. I just pointed on conditional probability: if someone is writing comments on LW, (s)he is (with very high probability) not an animal. Therefore LW-commentators are special non-random subset from all animals.
I think that here are presented two different conjectures:
“I am animal”—therefore liquid water on the planets etc.
“I am randomly selected from all animals”.
The first is true and the second is false.
“I am randomly selected from all animals” I don’t endorse this claim. It implies that my essence is prior to my existence, and I disagree with this assumption. I do believe I was once a soul placed into a random body within a set.
My essence follows from my existence, if I was different I would be someone else. I do stand by the claim, “I can reason as if I am randomly selected from all animals” this is true for any set I am a part of, if you did select a random member of that set I am a possible result, some sets just give unintuitive results, but that’s simply because reasoning from a particular positionality only gives part of the picture.
Anthropic shadow only requires the later epistemic claim to be valid and is not dependent on the metaphysical claim.
I didn’t try to make any metaphysical claims. I just pointed on conditional probability: if someone is writing comments on LW, (s)he is (with very high probability) not an animal. Therefore LW-commentators are special non-random subset from all animals.