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Carinthium comments on Yet more "stupid" questions - Less Wrong Discussion
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Requesting advice on a very minor and irrelevant ethical question that's relevant to some fiction I'm writing.
The character involved has the power to "reset" the universe, changing it to a universe identical to some previous time, except that the character himself (if he's still there- if he isn't he's killed himself) retains all his memories as they were rather than them changing.
Primarily, I'm thinking through the ethical implications here. I'm not good with this sort of thing, so could somebody talk me through the implications if the character follows Lesswrong ethics?
Oh! Is this your Hypothetical A?
Interesting! What happens to everyone else when the universe "resets"? Do they basically die?
They no longer exist, so in a sense yes. However, they are replaced with identical copies of what they were in the past.
EDIT: If they existed at the time, of course.
Well, here's an intuition pump for you: Suppose the universe is reset to the time of birth of a person P, and the hero (who is someone other than person P) does things differently this time so that person P grows up in a different environment. It seems to me that this act is just as bad for P as the act of killing P and then causing a genetically identical clone of P to be born, which is a bad act.
On the other hand, if the hero resets the universe to 1 millisecond ago, there is virtually no effect on person P, so it does not seem to be a bad act.
So for practical purposes, the hero can use the power for bursts of, say, an hour or less, without ethical issues involved?
Well, here are some relevant questions:
Your answers to 1 and 2 might be different. I feel like I might answer 1 with "okay" and 2 with "pretty bad", which suggests there's something tricky about assessing how much harm is done.
I say the extent to which he has "killed" people is dependent on how much he diverges the new universe.
As in, Person A has some value between "Dead" and "Alive" which depends on the extent to which they differ from Person A' as a result of the reset.