I think it is clear what a copy of you in its own world is. Just copy, atom-for-atom, everything in the solar system, and put the whole thing in another part of the universe such that it cannot interact with the original you. If copying the other people bothers you, just consider the value of the copy of you itself, ignoring the value or disvalue of the other copies.
It’s clear what the situations you talk about are, but these are not the kind of situation your brainware evolved to morally estimate. (This is not the case of a situation too difficult to understand, nor is it a case of a situation involving opposing moral pressures.) The “untranslatable” metaphor was intended to be a step further than you interpreted (which is more clearly explained in my second comment).
Will see. I just have very little hope for progress to be made on this particular dead horse. I offered some ideas about how it could turn out that on human level progress can’t in principle be made on this question (and some similar ones).
Can you call this particular issue a ‘dead horse’ when it hasn’t been a common subject of argument before? (I mean, most of the relevant conversations in human history hadn’t gone past the sophomoric question of whether a copy of you is really you.)
If you’re going to be pessimistic on the prospect of discussion, I think you’d at very least need a new idiom, like “Don’t start beating a stillborn horse”.
If you’re going to be pessimistic on the prospect of discussion, I think you’d at very least need a new idiom, like “Don’t start beating a stillborn horse”.
I think it is clear what a copy of you in its own world is. Just copy, atom-for-atom, everything in the solar system, and put the whole thing in another part of the universe such that it cannot interact with the original you. If copying the other people bothers you, just consider the value of the copy of you itself, ignoring the value or disvalue of the other copies.
It’s clear what the situations you talk about are, but these are not the kind of situation your brainware evolved to morally estimate. (This is not the case of a situation too difficult to understand, nor is it a case of a situation involving opposing moral pressures.) The “untranslatable” metaphor was intended to be a step further than you interpreted (which is more clearly explained in my second comment).
oh ok. But the point of this post and the followup is to try to make inroads into morally estimating this, so I guess wait until the sequel.
Roko, have you seen my post The Moral Status of Independent Identical Copies? There are also some links in the comments of that post to earlier discussions.
Will see. I just have very little hope for progress to be made on this particular dead horse. I offered some ideas about how it could turn out that on human level progress can’t in principle be made on this question (and some similar ones).
Can you call this particular issue a ‘dead horse’ when it hasn’t been a common subject of argument before? (I mean, most of the relevant conversations in human history hadn’t gone past the sophomoric question of whether a copy of you is really you.)
If you’re going to be pessimistic on the prospect of discussion, I think you’d at very least need a new idiom, like “Don’t start beating a stillborn horse”.
I like the analogy!