I recently discussed this on twitter with @Jessica_Taylor, and think that there’s a weird claim involved that collapses into either believing that distance changes moral importance, or that thicker wires in a computer increases its moral weight. (Similar to the cutting dominos in half example in that post, or the thicker pencil, but less contrived.) Alternatively, it confuses the question by claiming that identical beings at time t_0 are morally different because they differ at time t_n—which is a completely different claim!
I think the many worlds interpretation confuses this by making it about causally separated beings which are either, in my view, only a single being, or are different because they will diverge. And yes, different beings are obviously counted more than once, but that’s explicitly ignoring the question. (As a reducto, if we asked “Is 1 the same as 1” the answer is yes, they are identical platonic numbers, but if we instead ask “is 1 the same as 1 plus 1″ the answer is no, they are different because the second is… different, by assumption!)
It sounds like MichaelDickens’ reply is probably right, that we don’t need to consider identical experiences in order for this argument to go through.
But the question of whether identical copies of the same experience have any additional value is a really interesting one. I used to feel very confident that they have no value at all. I’m now a lot more uncertain, after realising that this view seems to be in tension with the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bzSfwMmuexfyrGR6o/the-ethics-of-copying-conscious-states-and-the-many-worlds
I recently discussed this on twitter with @Jessica_Taylor, and think that there’s a weird claim involved that collapses into either believing that distance changes moral importance, or that thicker wires in a computer increases its moral weight. (Similar to the cutting dominos in half example in that post, or the thicker pencil, but less contrived.) Alternatively, it confuses the question by claiming that identical beings at time t_0 are morally different because they differ at time t_n—which is a completely different claim!
I think the many worlds interpretation confuses this by making it about causally separated beings which are either, in my view, only a single being, or are different because they will diverge. And yes, different beings are obviously counted more than once, but that’s explicitly ignoring the question. (As a reducto, if we asked “Is 1 the same as 1” the answer is yes, they are identical platonic numbers, but if we instead ask “is 1 the same as 1 plus 1″ the answer is no, they are different because the second is… different, by assumption!)