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Kindly comments on Causal Universes - Less Wrong
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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.