What if you stop the simulation and reality is very large indeed, and someone else starts a simulation somewhere else which just happens, by coincidence, to pick up where your simulation left off? Has that person averted the harm?
Suppose I am hiking in the woods, and I come across an injured person, who is unconscious (and thus unable to feel pain) and leave him there to die of his wounds. (We are sufficiently out in the middle of nowhere that nobody else will come along before he dies.) If reality is large enough that there is another Earth out there with the same man dying of his wounds, and on that Earth, I choose to rescue him, does that avert the harm that happens to of the man I left to die? I feel this is the same sort of question as many-worlds. I can’t wave away my moral responsibility by claiming that in some other universe, I will act differently.
What if you stop the simulation and reality is very large indeed, and someone else starts a simulation somewhere else which just happens, by coincidence, to pick up where your simulation left off? Has that person averted the harm?
Suppose I am hiking in the woods, and I come across an injured person, who is unconscious (and thus unable to feel pain) and leave him there to die of his wounds. (We are sufficiently out in the middle of nowhere that nobody else will come along before he dies.) If reality is large enough that there is another Earth out there with the same man dying of his wounds, and on that Earth, I choose to rescue him, does that avert the harm that happens to of the man I left to die? I feel this is the same sort of question as many-worlds. I can’t wave away my moral responsibility by claiming that in some other universe, I will act differently.