this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2023
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A couple of problems: a copy of me is not me, no amount of post-life paradise justifies injustice in life, not everyone deserve hapiness (no matter what moral framework you use), what is the point of life if there is an eternal paradice for everyone.
From the moment I introduce afterlife some sort of God becomes necessary for any morality to work.
Having no God works if I assume that life is finite. If life is finite then I must make myself as happy as possible. Living around and with people I can't just be as selfish as possible, I must conform to society if I want to be in society, otherwise I will make my life so much more difficult.
That's true. Unless you are the copy of an original, in which case the copy is you.
Is it just to perform a painful surgery on a sick child in order to save their life?
Agree to disagree. The notion of cosmic justice for souls whose behavior in life is significantly dictated by the terms of their embodiment and environment is, to me, insane.
Maybe the point of life isn't absolute and is up to each person to find and define individually.
If there is any degree of intelligence in the design of the universe, the fact that there's no absolute frame of reference for macro observations and relative measurements of micro details might just be relevant.
In which case I'm not the original, my point exactly.
The analogy breaks down rather quickly when you start to expand the definition of a surgery. Dying because of war is not surgery and if it is who and how decides on the goal of the surgery?
What if I don't want the surgery and want to live out the rest of my days in comfort?
I actually agree with you. However my point is about a subjective morality rather than a cosmic one. Any definition of morality and meaning of life will ultimately break if this life is not the one and only. As soon as you try to fit afterlife into this you have to have some omnipotent power to define the rules of it. Otherwise none of your actions matter, you'll still get afterlife, be it heaven or hell.
Having life be finite and bound to physical conditions: being a social creature in an imperfect world. Is enough to have a robust and consistent moral rules and meaning. That's where my Occam's razor kicks.
In the end no matter what framework of thought you choose there is gonna be good and bad things and people doing them, hence not everyone will deserve happiness.
And that's where my anger would stem from. If there is no knowable and proovable absolute truth. Than the simplest subjective frame of reference that makes sense is that there is no meaning or reason. Life is finite, make the best of it and enjoy it to the fullest because that's all there is.
I'm not going into the aspects of life that are not individual and affect others. There are law based, moral and social-utalitarian reasons why I would want to live in a society and bring as little suffering as I possibly can.
Aye, that is a key issue as there's no informed consent to being born.
But how much of that is the fault of a creator of a universe and how much one's parents? FWIW, one of the traditions that thought similar to what we are discussing was fairly against having kids.
It could be managed if we are exact copies of people who lived, as if the originals consented to it then we may well be in a kind of Severance situation where you exist in a world of suffering because you (in a sense) consented to it.
Though it is arguably more interesting if rather than exact copies we are an archetypical copy of humanity. Individual and unique in our own existence here and now, but an accurate aggregate resemblance of humanity circa 2023.
There, informed consent very much is a challenge as there's many who would want our metaphorical surgery and others who would not and they can't express an opinion until they exist in the first place.
But a knowable and probable absolute truth collapses the possible options.
If someone really hates the idea of continuing to exist in any way after death and feels like the existence of a god or not being an original would rob their life of meaning - should they be denied their ability to reject these ideas so that another is able to embrace them?
Vice versa, if we have the capacity to define things as different results for different observers, should we deny others the ability to have their own beliefs about the unknown by making a single option probable?
The relative measurement at small scales in our own universe only works when the thing being measured is unobserved until each individual observer making a measurement is separated from the others. If they are together, the measurement is singular for all involved.
Again - I will agree it causes a challenge with informed consent. But no belief system I'm aware of that has endorsed a similar model has also endorsed an omnipotent creator, and as long as there are logical limits in place the loss of absolute or prior informed consent in exchange for access to relatively ideal continued existence seems like it would be more than fair for most given commonly held beliefs.
We are going into a what if terirory here and I don't think there is any good argument to be had there.
So I'm gonna end on this:
A copy is not an original. I am me, nothing more nothing less. There is no consent I can give prior to my existence. Going further into the analogy is pointless, life is not a surgery.
~~Umm, Christianity? Just to name at least one major religion.~~
I misread that so ignore it.
Cannonical Christianity claims this is a copy of an original world with universal salvation and an individualized afterlife?
Ironically there is a heretical Christian sect that thought all those things, but it died out in antiquity. But those concepts are pretty much the opposite of the mainstream Christian theology.
Aye, that is a key issue as there's no informed consent to being born.
But how much of that is the fault of a creator of a universe and how much one's parents? FWIW, one of the traditions that thought similar to what we are discussing was fairly against having kids.
It could be managed if we are exact copies of people who lived, as if the originals consented to it then we may well be in a kind of Severance situation where you exist in a world of suffering because you (in a sense) consented to it.
Though it is arguably more interesting if rather than exact copies we are an archetypical copy of humanity. Individual and unique in our own existence here and now, but an accurate aggregate resemblance of humanity circa 2023.
There, informed consent very much is a challenge as there's many who would want our metaphorical surgery and others who would not and they can't express an opinion until they exist in the first place.
But a knowable and probable absolute truth collapses the possible options.
If someone really hates the idea of continuing to exist in any way after death and feels like the existence of a god or not being an original would rob their life of meaning - should they be denied their ability to reject these ideas so that another is able to embrace them?
Vice versa, if we have the capacity to define things as different results for different observers, should we deny others the ability to have their own beliefs about the unknown by making a single option probable?
The relative measurement at small scales in our own universe only works when the thing being measured is unobserved until each individual observer making a measurement is separated from the others. If they are together, the measurement is singular for all involved.
Again - I will agree it causes a challenge with informed consent. But no belief system I'm aware of that has endorsed a similar model has also endorsed an omnipotent creator, and as long as there are logical limits in place the loss of absolute or prior informed consent in exchange for access to relatively ideal continued existence seems like it would be more than fair for most given commonly held beliefs.