[extropy-chat] Are ancestor simulations immoral? (An attempted survey)

[Russell Wallace]

On 5/24/06, Samantha Atkins <sjatkins at mac.com> wrote:
>
> I also suspect that one reason for creating a  historical sim is to
> tweak the factors involved as minimally as possible to get a
> different and better outcome.  This could be one way to learn more
> deeply from experience.


There might be other reasons for doing it too.

Suppose you invented a time machine (of the science fiction variety that can
take you back to any point in history without announcing your presence by
flinging solar masses of unobtainium around the place). What's the first
thing you do with it? Well, the traditional answer is straightforward: maybe
you want to attend Woodstock or talk philosophy with Socrates or go dinosaur
hunting or whatever, but along the way you stop off and kill Hitler.

If you subscribe to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (as
I do) then you have created an Everett branch in which Hitler died early,
therefore hopefully in which the Holocaust didn't occur. This is good, is it
not?

Now suppose you create a simulation of Earth ~1930 onward, accurate in every
respect except that Hitler died early in your simulation and therefore the
Holocaust didn't occur. Given that by hypothesis a simulation is
subjectively indistinguishable from a "real" Everett branch, should this not
be considered good in exactly the same way?

(Just to make it clear, my claim is not that we should rush out and create
simulations as above - it's not like it's going to be an option anytime soon
anyway, and if anyone ever does have the option they'll have a lot more
information at their disposal and a lot more time to think about it than we
have. My claim is only that there is no basis for assuming such must
necessarily be wrong.)

I would rather risk suffering and dying, even countless times,  in
> some lunatic posthuman hell than allow some sophonts such unlimited
> power to forbid absolutely anything and everything that might be used
> somehow, sometime in a way they don't like.   That would be worse
> than hell for me.


Agreed.
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