With this kind of question I like to try to disentangle ‘second-order effects’ from the actual core of what’s being asked, namely whether the presence of these copies is considered valuable in and of itself.
So for instance, someone might argue that “lock-step copies” in a neighboring galaxy are useful as back-ups in case of a nearby gamma-ray burst or some other catastrophic system crash. Or that others in the vicinity who are able to observe these “lock-step copies” without affecting them will nevertheless benefit in some way (so, the more copies, the more people can see them). Or simply that having “lock-step copies” is good because we don’t need to keep them in lock-step. These are all sensible responses but they miss the point.
To me it seems absolutely obvious that having extra copies serves no purpose at all. E.g. If I was a great composer, and I wrote an outstanding symphony, what good would it be if my copy wrote the very same symphony? Actually, this example illustrates my entire approach to moral questions—that the essence of goodness is the creation of things that are beautiful and/or profound. Beauty and profundity depend on the ‘information content’ of whatever is created, and a universe containing two copies of X contains only negligibly more information than a universe with a single copy of X.
If we’re only talking about ‘statistically identical copies’ then of course the situation is different. One can imagine two ‘statistically identical’ copies of Beethoven circa 1800 writing rather similar first symphonies but radically different ninth symphonies.
With this kind of question I like to try to disentangle ‘second-order effects’ from the actual core of what’s being asked, namely whether the presence of these copies is considered valuable in and of itself.
So for instance, someone might argue that “lock-step copies” in a neighboring galaxy are useful as back-ups in case of a nearby gamma-ray burst or some other catastrophic system crash. Or that others in the vicinity who are able to observe these “lock-step copies” without affecting them will nevertheless benefit in some way (so, the more copies, the more people can see them). Or simply that having “lock-step copies” is good because we don’t need to keep them in lock-step. These are all sensible responses but they miss the point.
To me it seems absolutely obvious that having extra copies serves no purpose at all. E.g. If I was a great composer, and I wrote an outstanding symphony, what good would it be if my copy wrote the very same symphony? Actually, this example illustrates my entire approach to moral questions—that the essence of goodness is the creation of things that are beautiful and/or profound. Beauty and profundity depend on the ‘information content’ of whatever is created, and a universe containing two copies of X contains only negligibly more information than a universe with a single copy of X.
If we’re only talking about ‘statistically identical copies’ then of course the situation is different. One can imagine two ‘statistically identical’ copies of Beethoven circa 1800 writing rather similar first symphonies but radically different ninth symphonies.