Something very like the view I’m suggesting can be found in Albert & Loewer (1988) and their so-called ‘many minds’ interpretation. This is interesting to read about, but the whole idea strikes me as extremely hand-wavey and silly. Here’s David Wallace with a dunk: “If it is just a fundamental law that consciousness is associated with some given basis, clearly there is no hope of a functional explanation of how consciousness emerges from basic physics.”
I should also mention that I tried explaining this idea to another philosopher of physics, who took it as a reductio of MWI! I suppose you might also take it as a reductio of any kind of total consequentialism also. One man’s modus ponens...
David Lewis briefly discusses the ethical implications of his modal realism (warning: massive pdf), concluding that there aren’t any. This may be of interest, but not sufficiently similar to the case at hand to be directly relevant, I think.
Another potential ethical implication: Hal Finney makes the point that MWI should steer you towards maximising good outcomes in expectation if you weren’t already doing so (e.g. if you were previously risk-averse, risk-seeking, or just somehow insensitive to very small probabilities of extreme outcomes). The whole thread is a nice slice of LW history and worth reading.
More Notes
Something very like the view I’m suggesting can be found in Albert & Loewer (1988) and their so-called ‘many minds’ interpretation. This is interesting to read about, but the whole idea strikes me as extremely hand-wavey and silly. Here’s David Wallace with a dunk: “If it is just a fundamental law that consciousness is associated with some given basis, clearly there is no hope of a functional explanation of how consciousness emerges from basic physics.”
I should also mention that I tried explaining this idea to another philosopher of physics, who took it as a reductio of MWI! I suppose you might also take it as a reductio of any kind of total consequentialism also. One man’s modus ponens...
David Lewis briefly discusses the ethical implications of his modal realism (warning: massive pdf), concluding that there aren’t any. This may be of interest, but not sufficiently similar to the case at hand to be directly relevant, I think.
Another potential ethical implication: Hal Finney makes the point that MWI should steer you towards maximising good outcomes in expectation if you weren’t already doing so (e.g. if you were previously risk-averse, risk-seeking, or just somehow insensitive to very small probabilities of extreme outcomes). The whole thread is a nice slice of LW history and worth reading.