chaosmosis comments on Causal Universes - LessWrong

60 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 November 2012 04:08AM

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Comment author: chaosmosis 04 December 2012 03:08:59AM *  0 points [-]

I'm protecting someone over not-someone.

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.

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?)

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.

Comment author: Davidmanheim 04 December 2012 04:58:22PM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: chaosmosis 04 December 2012 06:01:33PM 1 point [-]

If you're not interested in discussing the ethics of time travel, why did you respond to my comment which said

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.

with

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.

It seems pretty clear that I was talking about time travel, and your comment could also be interpreted that way.

But, whatever.

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