I hadn’t considered that. I must grant that it’s hard to argue about the issue in a way that’s universally convincing. It quite depends on what you mean by “identical copies”.
Non-diverging cheap mergeable copies (e.g. in the context of additional deterministic whole-universe copies) don’t have much additional weight for me. But copies that are merely identical in their internal state, but (will) have a different external context and thus future are important.
So 3^^^3 is much larger than anything physical in our universe … that doesn’t stop me from entertaining hypotheticals about 3^^^3 (with or without collisions) people.
Maybe I can take as the point that it can’t possibly matter if our intuitions fail at the scale of 3^^^3 (likely they do, but we can do explicit math instead) - it only matters if our intuitions fail at the scale of things that are actually possible in the universe.
Because it isn’t settled whether harming two different people is worse than harming two identical copies of one person.
I hadn’t considered that. I must grant that it’s hard to argue about the issue in a way that’s universally convincing. It quite depends on what you mean by “identical copies”.
Non-diverging cheap mergeable copies (e.g. in the context of additional deterministic whole-universe copies) don’t have much additional weight for me. But copies that are merely identical in their internal state, but (will) have a different external context and thus future are important.
So 3^^^3 is much larger than anything physical in our universe … that doesn’t stop me from entertaining hypotheticals about 3^^^3 (with or without collisions) people.
Maybe I can take as the point that it can’t possibly matter if our intuitions fail at the scale of 3^^^3 (likely they do, but we can do explicit math instead) - it only matters if our intuitions fail at the scale of things that are actually possible in the universe.
It’s the same thing, as I understand. Two identical copies are two different people.
The root of this might be in determining what is “identical”.
If you have two identical copies and one is destroyed/hurt, then the copies are no longer identical.
Perhaps in this case, and maybe others, two identical copies of people can be worth one, until something changes them, eg getting destroyed.
I’ll leave this here.