Quote:
Originally Posted by cosmicfish
It's similar to the Trolley Problem, but let me give you a variant.
Imagine that you are in a room, with an innocent person strapped to an electric chair, and that you have the switch and the sole decision to kill them or free them. Individually, the decision to throw the switch or not is your personal moral decision, with real consequence for that person and the world. With me so far?
Now imagine that there is another room, with another innocent person in another electric chair and someone else holding that switch. Whatever decision you make, they will make the opposite - if you spare your innocent, the other innocent dies, but if you kill yours then the other goes free. Your personal morality may compel you to choose one way or the other, but the net result will always be the same - one dead innocent person, one innocent person freed.
This is what infinite universes means - you can make your personal moral decisions but in the grand scheme they are meaningless. Your choices merely decide which reality you personally experience without actually changing the sum total of reality. If you know that this is the case, then does your morality have any meaning? All of your options are simultaneously realized, so you really don't have options per se - the combined infinity remains the same.
The joy of the person you saved exists simultaneously with the pain of the person you killed in another universe. The probability curve, sampled infinitely, does not vary.
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No it isn't. Here are some differences
A) The decisions I make in this universe are in no way directly linked to the decisions other mes make in other universes.
B) Who cares that there is no net change in goodness in the Universes? Who can measure such a thing? Who has a point of view that would let them even notice that such a balance exists? Who says that isn't the way things work where all things are balanced out across the entire multiverse?
C) The Trolley Problem and this variant have no basis in alternative universes or in fact in any reality at all but are thought experiments in ethics. There is absolutely no evidence that it has any relevance to the question of multiple universes.
D) Given your basic premise, I would just sit on my butt and do nothing, satisfied knowing that in a different universe a me has decided to work and have a job, earn a living and have a nice place to live. That is great but the me that does that is still going be pretty unhappy living in a cardboard box wearing old newspapers for shoes. I only experience the universe I exist in, based on my decisions within it. And guess what,the me writing this wants to experience pleasant things, or at least do the right thing.