this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2023
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Assuming other implications (existence of an afterlife and God) with this scenario I would have but one question. Why? Why everything? Honestly I would be mad furious if there was an afterlife. More so if there was a God.
What if the afterlife was universally accessible like a participation prize and relative to each individual such that there wasn't a single idealized version of happiness?
Is that still fury invoking?
Not OP, but my fury in this instance would be because an omnipotent god allowed for all the suffering that happens to all living creatures when we could all just live with love and joy in our hearts, and god chose this instead.
What if the creator isn't omnipotent and what if the universe isn't the original copy?
One of the ways to potentially achieve an afterlife would be to recreate the living creatures and their environment as simulated copies that wouldn't need to die. The physical originals would die, but the copies would live on.
Is it still unethical to recreate an evolved and chaotic universe of suffering if you could by doing so give each participant a much longer existence in a relative paradise for everyone?
Would it be more ethical to have whitewashed history such that you exclusively recreate the privileged and fortunate denying those that suffered in an original reality from representation in a functionally eternal and relative paradise? i.e. Would it be better to pretend orphans didn't exist than to accurately represent the historical reality while giving those recreations the opportunity to reunite with their parents in an uncapped afterlife?
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.
Yes. Recreating a 'relative paradise' where people have to suffer over and over would be worse than having to live it once. If you could recreate the universe, would you make people suffer? Forever?
What the fuck even is this argument? There's no whitewashing if you start over every time anyway. Just make it better from the beginning.
Huh?
No, the posed scenario is where you would recreate the individual as accurately as possible to match the historical reality and then after death give them an effective eternity of relative paradise as best matches their individuality.
So an orphan could spend years and years of happiness with the parents they never really knew whereas someone with abusive parents might never see their parents at all and instead chose to erase traumatic memories or do whatever it is that gives them joy.
The recreation of suffering in the thought experiment is solely for the purpose of recreating people who suffered such that you can give them an afterlife absent of suffering as they see fit. Because without recreating the suffering and the sufferers you'd only be creating a false depiction of Earth and humanity where you'd effectively exclude the downtrodden from resurrection by way of recreation.
They don't suffer over and over - they only suffer once in reliving an accurately representative life to the original reality upon which they are based, and from then on its their relative paradise.
I see what you're saying, but I still don't understand why the suffering has to occur here. If you have the data to recreate the suffering, you can just move on to the paradise without repeating it.
You've come up with this scenario, but it doesn't address my initial point that a god who created and allows suffering can suck it.
It's a good point, but there's two caveats.
(1) That only works if individual lives are deterministic and have no free will, but not if you want the individuals born into historical circumstances have their own self-determination from there on out.
(2) What's the subjective experience of that recreation? In a cosmic sense, everything we are experiencing right now has already happened in a different reference frame. Even if some being snapped its fingers and recreated a historical timeline all at once, it might not feel that way to the individual consciousnesses getting up to speed. Even if everything is deterministic and was instantaneously recreated, we may just be having an illusionary experience of it as a continuous series of events from birth to death. A variation of Boltzmann's brain.