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gjm comments on Causal Universes - Less Wrong
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Re [1] I totally noticed that "Flight of the Navigator" is a story about a kidnapped, returned boy who forges a new relationship with his older parents and ex younger, now older brother, and a cute nurse at the government facility, and then kills them all.
To say understanding this spoiled the story for me is an understatement. That movie has more dead people than Star Wars. It's a fricken' tragedy.
Um. Doesn't Star Wars (I take it we're talking about the movie otherwise known as "Episode IV" rather than the whole series) more or less begin with the destruction of an entire planet? And ... is it actually clear that the only way to implement time travel is the one Eliezer describes, and that it's best described as killing everyone involved? It doesn't look that way to me.
But I haven't seen Flight of the Navigator so maybe there are details that nail things down more.
The Star Wars series is about the tragic destruction of one planet and two death stars, and the childish bickering that caused it.
Flight of the Navigator ends the timeline. It destroys every planet, every star, every wandering spaceship billions of light years into the dark, total universal omnicide. And a reboot into a new timeline from a previously existing history.
Upvoted for "omnicide".
And it does it on a routine basis. After all, most of the critters are returned to the moment they were taken.
Why would the old timeline deserve to exist more than the new one?
Suppose I destroy the timeline, and create an identical one. Have I committed a moral evil? No, because nothing has been lost.
Suppose I destroy the timeline, and restart from an earlier point. Have I committed a moral evil? Very much yes. What was lost? To give only one person's example from Flight of the Navigator out of a planet of billions, out of a whole universe, the younger brother who was left behind had spent years - of personal growth, of creating value and memories - helping his parents with their quixotic search. And then bonding with the new younger "older" brother, rejoicing with his parents, marvelling at the space ship. And then he was erased.
I don't disagree that things are lost. But on the other hand, there are things that the new timeline has that the old timeline didn't as well. In the new timeline, the younger brother also has experiences that his counterpart in the old timeline did not.
By choosing not to destroy the timeline to create a new one, you deny the new-timeline younger brother his experiences, as well as everyone else in the new universe. Either way, something is lost. It seems that the only reason to treat the original universe as special is status-quo bias.
Suppose I have the opportunity to end literally all suffering in the universe, and choose not to.
These experiences aren't undone. They are stopped. There is a difference. Something happy that happens, and then is over, still counts as a happy thing.
You destroy valuable lives. You also create valuable lives. If creating things has as much value as maintaining them does, then the act of creative destruction is morally neutral. Since the only reasons that I can think of why maintaining lives might matter are also reasons that the existence of life is a good thing, I think that maintenance and creation are morally equal.
Tentative answer: It was presumably more of a collaborative process than a timeline chosen by one person.
Any opinions about Asimov's The End of Eternity? An organization attempts to optimize the timeline. The book might be a good starter for discussion of CEV, terminal values, and such.
Has anyone read Garfinkle's *All of an Instant"? I've never finished it, but the premise is that time travel is a biological capacity, and when many people discover it, all chaos ensues.