Here are three other responses that I didn’t see addressed. I only skimmed the original article so apologies if these were addressed there.
The saturation view does not obviously avoid the repugnant conclusion. (To be clear, I don’t think the repugnant conclusion should be avoided; I think people’s intuitions are misled by scope insensitivity.) The number of morally distinct experiences is probably very large—perhaps proportional to 2 to the power of the number of neurons, which would mean there are vastly more possible experiences than will ever realize. You could easily have a world with (say) 10^20 barely-worth-living lives that are all sufficiently distinct such that this world, on the saturation view, is better than a world with only (say) 10^7 extremely good lives.
I strongly suspect that the difference between the total view and the saturation view is a factual question, not a moral one. I suspect that if we had a solution to the hard problem of consciousness, then it would follow from that solution whether we should care about repeated experiences equally.
I have an intuition that the value of my own life is innate, and not related to who else might have a similar life. If someone offers me a good experience, I don’t say, “Wait, let me check if anyone else has had an identical experience at some point in the past, because if so, my experience won’t have any value.” Or if I have a really good experience and then after the fact someone tells me that it doesn’t count because a clone of me already had the same experience last week, I’d say: “No, you’re wrong; I just felt that experience, and it was good, and I know it was good because I experienced it being good, and you can’t take that away from me.”
A fourth point, which the article did address:
First, you could reinterpret the intuition as entirely instrumental. Perhaps variety matters only because it tends to support exploration, learning, and other welfare-promoting goods. If so, then our intuition that Variety is better than Homogeneity is a misfire, attributing intrinsic value to something that has only instrumental value.
[the article’s reply:]
Imagine some truly wonderful moment — of falling in love, or a flash of creative insight, or communing with the spiritual. Suppose that this moment is far more wonderful than anything that humanity has experienced to date: you or I would give up years of ordinary happy life just to experience such a peak of joy. But now suppose that this moment is just ever so slightly less good than some other moment that could be produced, with the same resources. So, instead, the world consists of a near-endless reliving of that other moment, and that first moment is never experienced at all.
To me, this feels like a tremendous loss. The world has omitted something wonderful that could have been created.
This doesn’t seem like a satisfying response to me. I could say that your feeling of tremendous loss stems from the instrumental value of novel experiences; you haven’t done anything to dispel that argument.
I would consider it from a first person POV. Suppose I’m given the choice to experience something amazing, or something a bit less amazing. If I experienced either thing in the past, then I have no memory of it (to guarantee that it’s a proper replication of the amazing experience, and not a version altered by memory). I would pick the amazing experience, and not the lesser one.
Here are three other responses that I didn’t see addressed. I only skimmed the original article so apologies if these were addressed there.
The saturation view does not obviously avoid the repugnant conclusion. (To be clear, I don’t think the repugnant conclusion should be avoided; I think people’s intuitions are misled by scope insensitivity.) The number of morally distinct experiences is probably very large—perhaps proportional to 2 to the power of the number of neurons, which would mean there are vastly more possible experiences than will ever realize. You could easily have a world with (say) 10^20 barely-worth-living lives that are all sufficiently distinct such that this world, on the saturation view, is better than a world with only (say) 10^7 extremely good lives.
I strongly suspect that the difference between the total view and the saturation view is a factual question, not a moral one. I suspect that if we had a solution to the hard problem of consciousness, then it would follow from that solution whether we should care about repeated experiences equally.
I have an intuition that the value of my own life is innate, and not related to who else might have a similar life. If someone offers me a good experience, I don’t say, “Wait, let me check if anyone else has had an identical experience at some point in the past, because if so, my experience won’t have any value.” Or if I have a really good experience and then after the fact someone tells me that it doesn’t count because a clone of me already had the same experience last week, I’d say: “No, you’re wrong; I just felt that experience, and it was good, and I know it was good because I experienced it being good, and you can’t take that away from me.”
A fourth point, which the article did address:
This doesn’t seem like a satisfying response to me. I could say that your feeling of tremendous loss stems from the instrumental value of novel experiences; you haven’t done anything to dispel that argument.
I would consider it from a first person POV. Suppose I’m given the choice to experience something amazing, or something a bit less amazing. If I experienced either thing in the past, then I have no memory of it (to guarantee that it’s a proper replication of the amazing experience, and not a version altered by memory). I would pick the amazing experience, and not the lesser one.