Did I Roll a One in a Billion to Be Human?

Hi everyone! This is my first (original) post on the forum and I have some reservations about it being taken as an argument against animal welfare as a cause area. So please keep in mind that this is a very low-confidence take, if simply going by my revealed preferences (the majority of my donations go towards animal welfare charities). I am mostly curious about what people think.

For every human born today, there are:

• 20 farmed mammals (cows, goats, sheep, pigs)
• 600 farmed birds (ducks and chicken)
• 10,000 wild fish
• 180,000 wild shrimp
• 10 billion insects

estimated to be born.^[1] 

This means that cumulatively, there are at least:

• 20 mammal births
• 620 mammal + bird births
• 10,620 mammal + bird + fish births
• 10 billion insect births (with all earlier categories becoming a rounding error)

for every human birth.

Knowing this, I can take the fact that I was born and that I’m a human, as a piece of evidence for humans being special, somehow. The order in which we add up different species could change. However, as we expand our selection of animals, the number of human births becomes very small in comparison to non-human ones. These numbers are illustrative and become more uncertain when we think of all possible births over time. However, up until now the number of non-human births was likely proportionally higher, since the number of human lives has only boomed over the past century.^[2]

Now, if it was equally likely that I was born as any of the animals on the list, the fact that I was born a human rather than an insect is nothing short of a miracle. It would be like rolling a 1 on a billion sided die on the first try. Intuition tells me that the much more likely explanation for what transpired is that the die is rigged rather than me really rolling a one. Limiting the ‘birth pool’ to only mammals, birds, and fish makes the resulting 1 in 10,000 chance seem like less of a miracle, but doesn’t do much to ease my suspicions that a different explanation is the more likely one.

As we decrease our birth pool, suspicion weakens. There are fewer apes born every second than humans, so if we believed that only humans and apes could be born sentient, being born a human is the expected outcome. In that case, me being born a human is in no way evidence against the capacity for sentience of apes. I would order beings by how likely they are to have a capacity for sentience based on current research - humans, apes, other mammals, chicken, fish, insects, digital minds (?) - and treat that as the prior for capacity for sentience, before I use my birth as evidence. One could begin with Komodo dragons, of which there are ~3000 individuals alive today. Regardless, the argument proposes that the bigger the group I add to the ‘potentially sentient’ birth pool, the more of a miracle that requires my (human) birth to have been.

The question of what it might mean for the die to be rigged remains. The only fact that would make my birth less of a miracle is one that reduces the chances of me coming into existence as a non-human. Some explanations I could come up with:

• I simply could not have been born as anything but a human. This is a speciesist explanation as it requires humans to be special in some way, unless we justify it using humans’ unique capacity for sentience.
• The birth pool is small, and humans are a part of it (e.g. only humans, apes, pigs and cephalopods are sentient), so that my birth is not a miracle.
• Not all individuals within a species are sentient. If only 1% of chicken are sentient, then the birth pool shrinks. That subset could be determined by various factors present prior to birth, such as genes.

• The system through which an entity is born is not probabilistic. Just because there are more births of a specific animal species, does not mean that I was more likely to be born as that species. I find this most likely, though it admittedly is an umbrella explanation which could include anything from divine intervention to the simulation hypothesis, to different conceptions of sentience that don't require being born to work the way I described at the beginning of the post.^[3]

This argument cannot, by design, invalidate the possibility of non-human animals being sentient. You could roll a one on a billion sided die, and it’s possible that me and everyone reading this, assuming that they’re sentient, just got really lucky. Or perhaps the line stops at a different animal, and we all got kinda lucky. I also don’t believe that it invalidates the capacity for non-human animals to experience suffering. A chicken could still experience a feeling of pain, manifested as a response to a stimulus via its nervous system, and just not be capable of being born the same way humans are. As far as I understand, scientific research leans heavily in favor of animals having a capacity for pain, which is why I don’t take this as an argument against reducing animal suffering as a cause area.

One counterargument I see: of all species, humans are the only ones that could plausibly reason and voice this argument. This would invalidate it because, even if there were trillions of sentient animals, humans are the only ones who would observe this anomaly, whereas trillions of insects who were nonetheless sentient would not be able to voice how their existence is evidence against it. I believe that this is true as far as talking about the very existence of the argument (if an alien came down and heard this argument being made, they would be right not to take it seriously on this very basis). However, as far as I am concerned, I am a human and I made this argument: I rolled the die and rolled a one.^[4] This is why I only refer to my own birth throughout the post. 

I assume that this argument has been made before. I’d love it if you pointed me to wherever that might be! I was unable to find examples of it for the longest time, but with the improvement of LLM’s I was able to find this open access paper, this LessWrong post, and this Substack post. Overall, this argument doesn't seem to have been discussed much, which I find surprising, as it is one of my primary sources of cognitive dissonance when it comes to my understanding of animal sentience. I refrained from reading those posts in depth before writing mine (I also admittedly got a little lost in the jargon), but I am now making my way through Anthropic Bias by Nick Bostrom (which served as the inspiration for the last paragraph). Any further recommendations on the topic are welcome, along with any thoughts or disagreements!

References:

https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-get-slaughtered-every-day. Used for the number of land animals slaughtered per day

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/wild-caught-fish. Used for wild fish slaughters

https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/shrimp-the-animals-most-commonly-used-and-killed-for-food-production/. Used for the number of shrimp killed each year

https://ourworldindata.org/births-and-deaths. Used for the number of humans born each year

https://www.si.edu/spotlight/buginfo/bugnos. Used for the number of insects that exist

1. ^{^}

   These are estimates using the number of slaughters as a proxy for the number of births. They do not account for longevity or trends in births over time. I did not want to complicate these estimations as the point was just to illustrate the order of magnitude. I used farmed mammals and birds as a lower bound for the total number of mammals and birds. For insects I simply used an estimation for the number of insects alive, which assumes that insects have an average lifespan of one year.

2. ^{^}

   Opening this discussion up to future lives opens a whole other can of worms. If humanity is likely to continue expanding well into the future, being born now as opposed to the future which (presumably) has millions times more births would be a statistical anomaly and would indicate that the more likely scenario is that humanity is nearing its end. I believe this is called the Doomsday Argument. I felt a mix of relief and mild annoyance when I found out that I wasn’t the first person to think of this.

3. ^{^}

   This is also the most common response I have gotten from people I have pitched this theory to (something to the effect of “I’m not sure that’s how that works”).

^{^}

Reincarnation being real would also invalidate this argument.

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