Consciousness finitism

My 11-year-old has an interesting intuition, that it is impossible to have an infinite number of conscious beings. She is untroubled by Hilbert’s Hotel, and insists the intuition is specific to conscious beigs, but is unable to put her finger on what exactly bothers her about an infinity of conscious beings. It’s not considerations like “If there are infinitely many people, you probably have a near-duplicate.” Near-duplicates don’t bother her. It’s consciousness specifically. She is surprised that a consciousness-specific finitist intuition isn’t more common.

My best attempt at a defense of consciousness-finitism was that it seems reasonable to think of yourself as a uniformly randomly chosen member of the set of all conscious beings. But thinking of yourself as a uniformly randomly chosen member of a countably infinite set leads to the well-known paradoxes of countably infinite fair lotteries. So that may provide some sort of argument for consciousness-finitism. But my daughter insists that’s not where her intuition comes from.

Another argument for consciousness-finitism would be the challenges of aggregating utilities across an infinite number of people: If all the people are positioned at locations numbered 1,2,3,…, and you benefit the people at even-numbered locations, you benefit the same quantity of people as when you benefit the people whose locations are divisible by four, but clearly benefiting the people at the even-numbered locations is a lot better. I haven’t tried this family of arguments on my daughter, but I don’t think her intuitions come from thinking about well-being.

Still, I have a hard time believing in the impossibility of an infinite number of consciousnesses on the strength of such arguments. The main reason I have such a hard time is that it seems obvious that you could have a forward infinite regress of conscious beings, each giving birth to the next.