1. How much dogs love us. There is no way we’ve been good enough boys/girls/humans to deserve this.

2. Popcorn. It’s freakily amazing that corn kernels turn into this stuff. And as a bonus, it’s delicious.

3. That humans, working together, eradicated the last wild strain of smallpox in the 1970s.

This was a mind-blowingly huge win for our species. It had plagued us since ~3rd century BCE and is estimated to have killed ~500 million people just during the last 100 years it was around.

4. That we have three types of color receptors. This allows most people to see an AMAZING array of colors!

Cats and dogs can’t do this, and things must look way duller.

However, colors probably are way cooler to birds, some of whom have FOUR color receptors and can see ultraviolets!

5. That we freaking EXIST! Think about that for a moment. Almost every human that has ever lived is not alive right now, but you and I are!

It seems to be crazy luck that we were born at all. If your parents had sex moments later, a different baby likely would have been born, as a different sperm likely would have fertilized the egg (or none would have at all). As  A.J. Jacobs points out, with an average of hundreds of millions of sperm per ejaculate, these odds are like winning a major Powerball lottery!

6. That we’re not chickens (or insects)!

Probabilistically speaking, shouldn’t we expect to be a member of the most abundant category of conscious beings on Earth rather than a rarer category?

If chickens are conscious (as I think they are), we really lucked out to be born human instead of one of the >20 billion chickens alive right now that’s living in terrible factory farm conditions (and that will die as soon as it is big enough or isn’t laying enough eggs).

If insects are conscious (have something that it’s like to be them, which might be true for some insect species, though I doubt it is true for all of them), then it’s REALLY weird we don’t find ourselves to be insects since there are vastly more of them than humans!

7. That any conscious beings exist at all! Why isn’t the universe just a bunch of gas and rocks and shit? It’s not at all obvious there should be anything that has the ability to have experiences – yet here we are!

It’s not even obvious why there is SOMETHING instead of NOTHING!

This was first written on February 19, 2021, and first appeared on this site on November 25, 2022.

Thinking along these lines, each of us can divide all things that exist or seem to exist into a few categories:

1. Those things that exist in physical reality that also have a representation in my simulation. An example of this would be some particular car that I see on the street. There are atoms (or quantum wave functions at least) in the universe that correspond to this car, and there is a visual experience in my simulation that represents this car. After I look at this car and walk away, my simulation continues to have the concept of this car, at least until I have forgotten about it. So the car exists in my simulation, but it also exists in physical reality as a bunch of atoms (though there is no dividing line in physical reality between where the car atoms end and not-car atoms begin, that dividing line too is a property of the simulation). Color is another thing in our simulation that corresponds to physical reality, but is of course only a representation of it. There is no “redness” in space, redness is something that we experience. What there is in space is electromagnetic radiation, some of which produces an experience of redness in our simulations after it hits the simulation/reality interface that we call our eyes.
2. Those things that exist in physical reality but have no representation in my simulation. This would include a particular planet in another galaxy that I’ve never heard of. Although I have the concept of planets existing, this particular planet has no representation in my simulation of reality.
3. Those things that exist in our simulation but are not representations of specific things in physical reality. An example of this would be a hallucination (sure, there are bunnies in physical reality, but that particular bunny that you think is laughing at you now and doing head stands doesn’t actually correspond to any set of atoms). Perhaps a more interesting example from this category though would be impurity. A dish is unclean, Jewish custom says, if it has touched both milk and meat. This contamination property continues to hold even after the plate is scrubbed completely clean, even if every atom of milk and meat are removed. Suppose that a man who lives by this system of thought is given a plate, and then he is told that it was recently used to eat both meat and milk. Regardless of whether that claim is true, so long as he believes it the plate will suddenly gain the property of uncleanness in his simulation. He may experience the sense of this uncleanness quite strongly, and the thought of eating from that plate may even cause him to feel disgust.

One thing that is odd about living inside a simulation (as we each are), is that aspects of the simulation that don’t correspond to anything in physical reality can feel just as real as those that do correspond. For instance, someone I know once had a schizophrenic period where they became convinced that certain objects in their kitchen were, in fact, quite evil. This evilness was completely convincing and quite overwhelming. But what does it mean for an object to be evil? Evilness surely is not a property of atoms, quantum wave functions, or physical objects, but a property of representations of things inside our simulations. Normally we only associate this property with intelligent beings, but when the simulation goes haywire it can get associated with inanimate things. Just as we think some particular clown nose is red (i.e. our simulation contains the experience of redness which our brain links to its concept of that clown nose), we could end up thinking that some particular bar of soap is evil (i.e. our simulation contains the experience of evilness which our brain links to its concept of that soap).

Influences: Michael Vassar