It's been pointed out how in the Avenger movies, Thanos wiping out half of all life in the universe having the effect of disappearing half of humans didn't really make sense, cause it would probably mostly take out insects, or maybe there's a small handful of planets that contain majority of individual lifeforms that would take the brunt of that.

I suppose it's implied it was "half of life" on a per-species basis. It's basically magic, so probably best not to think about it too much.

Makes sense to me. If every living being has 50 % chance of survival, so does every living human being, no matter what minority we are.

Not sure about the rest of Thanos's logic, of course...

"you could have been born as" and the so-called "life-lottery" are a matter of philosophical and belief-system debate.

The "you" (or: self) is a concept, a perception.

I am just me, and couldn't have been something else, or born in another timeline, or to different parents.

To elaborate this point a bit: the "lottery" concept requires you to believe there's like a queue of souls and they each get allocated to different bodies, and you're lucky you got a fancy one instead of a microscopic shrimp. A different -- and to me, more plausible -- way to look at it is that "you" are an emergent property of a specific complex organism. How you actually emerge is a fascinating and difficult discussion, but putting aside the mechanics, the implication of this framing is that "you could have been a microscopic shrimp" is meaningless, like asking "what if that cloud were instead a bowl of soup?"

What would be the “me” if I were to clone myself 1:1? Would there be two “me”s? Or a the same old “me”, a single consciousness but two bodies?

Two consciousnesses with the same origin. What's wrong with that?

The philosophical zombie might be an interesting rabbit hole for you! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

That problem used to mindfuck me. Eventually I realized it's more of an emergent problem, that only exists in our brains. Problem goes away by taking a step back and viewing the world from a perspective greater than self.

I'm gonna be reborn as microplastics and live eternally.

Yes, but as a thought experiment it is considered by many as the only way to make unbiased decisions about moral principles and how society should be structured. Moral philosopher John Rawls's uses the terms original position and veil of ignorance. You can think of them as "What we'd all decide for the world if each of us did not know ahead of time which person they'd would be born as".

https://open.library.okstate.edu/introphilosophy/chapter/joh...

> The Veil is meant to ensure that people’s concern for their personal benefit could translate into a set of arrangements that were fair for everyone, assuming that they had to stick to those choices once the Veil of Ignorance ‘lifts’, and they are given full information again.

> One set of facts hidden from you behind the Veil are what we might call ‘demographic’ facts. You do not know your gender, race, wealth, or facts about your personal strengths and weaknesses, such as their intelligence or physical prowess. Rawls thought these facts are morally arbitrary: individuals do not earn or deserve these features, but simply have them by luck. As such, they do not deserve any benefits or harms that come from them. By removing knowledge of the natural inequalities that give people unfair advantages, it becomes irrational to choose principles that discriminate against any particular group.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/original-position/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position

This is basically the Hindu belief system where you can reincarnate into any of those life forms depending on your karma in your previous life.

I'm not really up on Hinduism, but one of the implications of "atman is brahman" would be that, reciprocally "brahman is atman".

Therefore, also it's not the case that "you can reincarnate into any of those life forms" but rather that all those lifeforms, including you, are incarnations of the same over soul.

So, you always already are both those forms and not, and have just forgotten it was so.

And, then, finally, when you do bad things to those other incarnations you are doing them to yourself: it's not that you have to reincarnate to have someone else do shitty things to you, but rather the case that karma is always already in balance.

Anyhow, just my shitty heterodox take based on a single poorly applied mathematical rule.

Be well, other self.

Huh, soul is like the one-electron universe postulate, then.

Andy Weir's short story "The Egg" deals with similar topics.

https://www.paullowe.org/the-egg/

Now look at it from the other side. If it really was quadrillion times more probable to be born (hatched?) as a plankton, why exactly weren't you? Either tremendous luck, or something wrong with the assumption.

I don't understand that logic. Asking 'why aren't you part of the other thing' is answered 'because something has to be not part of it', not 'because luck'.

I admit I don't understand it fully either. If you want to read about it from more famous people than me, it is called "self-sampling argument". I'll try explain what I think I know.

Why some group is not empty is different from why it is me who is in that group, when I could very well be in the other one, like almost everyone. When the other group is much larger, then most potential "me"s will observe that they are in the larger, more typical group. The others will be surprised because they get the less common result, but most will not.

There are more intuitive examples than being human versus insect. Let's say, vast majority of people are not members of a royal family, so, knowing nothing else about myself, I should expect not to be, either. (Fits, afaik.) There are also some counterexamples, like that most people live elsewhere than in my town, but these are often tailored to me.

Going back to the plankton problem, I observe the equivalent of being a prince. Someone has to be, for sure, but is there a reason why me?

We are a creature that can think we won the lottery because if we were a creature that couldn't we would not be able to think it.

Also we think being human is the best because we are humans. Right between the start and the end of time in the centre of the universe.

Or maybe it's all still just a matter of perspective:

https://youtu.be/zyuYiehl2DM?t=173

Imagine being one a trillion cells in a human body, born into slavery serving an unknowable entity called the Mind that may as well be called God.

Slavery? I take extreme pains to keep them warm, happy, feed and hydrated at any time. My cells live better than me.