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chaosmosis comments on Causal Universes - Less Wrong
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I don't understand why it's morally wrong to kill people if they're all simultaneously replaced with marginally different versions of themselves. Sure, they've ceased to exist. But without time traveling, you make it so that none of the marginally different versions exist. It seems like some kind of act omission distinction is creeping into your thought processes about time travel.
Moreso, marginally different versions of people are replacing the originals all the time, by the natural physical processes of the universe. If continuity of body is unnecessary for personal identity, why is continuity of their temporal substrate?
Identity is a process, not a physical state. There is a difference between continuity of body, which is physical, and continuity of identity, which is a process. If I replace a hard drive from a running computer, it may still run all of the same processes. The same could be true of processors, or memory. But if I terminate the process, the physical substrate being the same is irrelevant.
I'm not even certain that identity is a process. The process of consciousness shuts down every time we go to sleep, and gets reconstituted from our memories the next time we wake up (with intermittent consciousness-like processes that occur in-between, while we dream).
It seems like the closest thing to "identity" that we have, these days, is a sort of nebulous locus of indistinguishably similar dynamic data structures, regardless of the substrate that is encoding or processing those structures. It seems a rather flimsy thing to hang an "I" on, though.
I'm unclear on your logic; whatever the mechanism, the "cogito" exists. (demonstrably to myself, and presumably to yourself.) Given this, why is it too flimsy? Why does it matter is there is a complex "nebulous locus" that instantiates it - it's there, and it works, and conveys, to me, the impression that I am.
The 'cogito', as you put it, exists in the sense that dynamic processes certainly have effect on the world, and those processes also tend to generate a sense of identity.
Just because it exists and has effect, though, is no reason to take its suggestions about the nature of that identity seriously.
Example: you probably tend to feel that you make choices from somewhere inside your head, as a response to your environment, rather than that your environment comes together in such a way that you react predictably to it, and coincidentally generate a sense of 'choice' as part of that feeling. Most people do this; it causes them to tend to attempt to apply willpower directly to "forcing" themselves to make the "choices" they think will produce the correct outcome, rather than crafting their environment so that they naturally react in such a way to produce that outcome, and coincidentally generate a sense that they "chose" to produce that outcome.
Wu wei wu, and all that.
And this is why we (barely) have checkpointing. If you close you web browser, and launch a saved copy from five minutes ago, is the session a different one?
Because our morality is based on our experiential process. We see ourselves as the same person. Because of this, we want to be protected from violence in the future, even if the future person is not "really" the same as the present me.
Why protect one type of "you" over another type? Your response gives a reason that future people are valuable, but not that those future people are more valuable than other future people.
I'm not protecting anyone over anyone else, I'm protecting someone over not-someone. Someone (ie. non-murdered person) is protected, and the outcome that leads to dead person is avoided.
Experientially, we view "me in 10 seconds" as the same as "me now." Because of this, the traditional arguments hold, at least to the extent that we believe that our impression of continuous living is not just a neat trick of our mind unconnected to reality. And if we don't believe this, we fail the rationality test in many more severe ways than not understanding morality. (Why would I not jump off buildings, just because future me will die?)
This ignores that insofar as going back in time kills currently existing people it also revives previously existing ones. You're ignoring the lives created by time travel.
If you're defending some form of egoism, maybe time travel is wrong. From a utilitarian standpoint, preferring certain people just because of their causal origins makes no sense.
Where did time travel come from? That's not part of my argument, or the context of the discussion about why murder is wrong; the time travel argument is just point out what non-causality might take the form of. The fact that murder is wrong is a moral judgement, which means it belongs to the realm of human experience.
If the question is whether changing the time stream is morally wrong because it kills people, the supposition is that we live in a non-causal world, which makes all of the arguments useless, since I'm not interested in defining morality in a universe that I have no reason to believe exists.
If you're not interested in discussing the ethics of time travel, why did you respond to my comment which said
with
It seems pretty clear that I was talking about time travel, and your comment could also be interpreted that way.
But, whatever.
I think we need to limit the set of morally relevant future versions to versions that would be created without interference, because otherwise we split ourselves too thinly among speculative futures that almost never happen. Given that, it makes sense to want to protect the existence of the unmodified future self over the modified one.
"I think we need to arbitrarily limit something. Given that, this specific limit is not arbitrary."
How is that not equivalent to your argument?
Additionally, please explain more. I don't understand what you mean by saying that we "split ourselves too thinly". What is this splitting and why does it invalidate moral systems that do it? Also, overall, isn't your argument just a reason that considering alternatives to the status quo isn't moral?
Well, the phrase "split ourselves too thinly among speculative futures that almost never happen" would seem to refer to the fact that we have limited time and processing capacity to think with.
I think it summarizes to "time travel is too improbable and unpredictable to worry about [preserving the interests of yous affected by it]".
Your argument makes no sense.
Those two sentences do not connect. They actually contradict.
Also, you're doing moral epistemology backwards, in my view. You're basically saying, "it would be really convenient if the content of morality was such that we could easily compute it using limited cognitive resources". That's an argumentum ad consequentum which is a logical fallacy.
You're probably right about it contradicting. Though, about the moral-epistemology bit, I think there may be a sort of anthropic-bias type argument that creatures can only implement a morality that they can practically compute to begin with.
Your argument is that it is hard and impractical, not that it is impossible, and I think that only the latter type is a reasonable constraint on moral considerations, although even then I have some qualms about whether or not nihilism would be more justified, as opposed to arbitrary moral limits. I also don't understand how anthropic arguments might come into play.
It depends. As for universes, so too for individual human beings: Is it moral (in a vacuum — we're assuming there aren't indirect harmful consequences) to kill a single individual, provided you replace him a second later with a near-perfect copy? That depends. Could you have made the clone without killing the original? If an individual's life is good, and you can create a copy of him that will also have a good life, without interfering with the original, then that act of copying may be ethically warranted, and killing either copy may be immoral.
Similarly, if you can make a copy of the whole universe without destroying the original, then, plausibly, it's just as wicked to destroy the old universe as it would be to destroy it without making a copy. You're subtracting the same amount of net utility. Of course, this is all assuming that the universe as a whole has positive value.
Regarding universes, there's a discussion of this in Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch novel, where future people debate traveling back in time to change the present, realizing that that means basically the elimination of every person presently exisiting.
Regarding individuals, I once wrote a short story about a scientist who placed his mind into the body of a clone of himself, via a destructive process (scanned his original brain synapse by synapse after slicing it up, recreated that in the clone via electro stimulation). He was tried for murder of the clone. I hadn't seen the connection between the two stories until now, though.