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Nisan comments on Yet more "stupid" questions - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.