From: Russell Wallace (russell.wallace@gmail.com)
Date: Sun Dec 12 2004 - 09:44:23 MST
On Sat, 11 Dec 2004 16:57:02 +1300 (NZDT), Marc Geddes
<marc_geddes@yahoo.co.nz> wrote:
> Another thought that has occurred to me is that MWI
> seems to create difficulties for the ethics of
> computer simulations. For instance, a major argument
> against ancestral simulations is that it would be
> unethical because of the suffering created. But if
> MWI is true, all these computations already exist with
> a certain frequency anyway, and if we run an ancestral
> simulation which matches the real universe then we
> will not have changed the frequency of time tracks
> where suffering is occuring, so why would it be
> unethical?
My current view on the issue of creating historically realistic
ancestor simulations is: What's the point? That sequence of events
already exists/existed, why replicate it? If you gave me a Jupiter
brain and associated software and said, "hey Russell, use this to run
ancestor simulations or whatever", I'd take the position that I'd want
any simulated worlds I ran to be in some significant way morally
better than our history. (If you like, you could look at such an act
as increasing the relative weight of morally good worlds compared to
neutral ones.)
- Russell
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