(In general I'd recommend including links to any mentioned sources in the body of the post. Unless this was an intentional omission, in which case sorry for undoing your carefully laid plans.)
I think the more important question (and possibly the one Nathan was intending to illicit, though I don't know) is how you count unique individuals at all.
The naive view of uniqueness, where a single person is a single computation being instantiated somewhere, has serious flaws. For example, there was a paper (I forget the name) that pointed out that you can build a two-dimensional water computer and run a human on it. You could then split the computer down the middle with the water flow completely undisrupted and now have two identical yet separate computers; does that suddenly create a second person? Or is the original water computer actually millions of people, one for each atomic width? Seems unintuitive either way.
The usual solution is to go with an informational conception of uniqueness, where a single person is defined by the information that comprises their mental states and experiences. Under this system, 1 million identical people are morally equivalent to a single person, regardless of whether their experiences are positive or negative. But this has its own problems, since it implies that simply creating a bitstring that describes a person experiencing suffering is the same as causing actual suffering.
My general sense is that there's two types of people on person individualization questions, viz:
1. Those who think that 'a light goes on in the universe' when a new person is made.
2. Those who think the individualization of persons is primarily just a question of conceptual choice
Once you fully reject dualism and non-physicalism, 2 becomes almost unavoidable, once you accept 2, the idea that it's a values choice more than anything becomes more plausible, and a lot of people haven't yet grasped the radical implications of the debate.
Well I have written this before, and probably. From the ethical perspective of judeo-christianity , if one reads in genesis one that everything was created good, and then the man and women, which are neither of them singular, eat of the tree---it is a tree of knowledge of good and evil. Biblically speaking, the opposite of good, is not evil, and the teaching that it is does not at all conform "to the text." The text distinguishes the opposite of good is "knowledge of good and evil", or man's folly of deciding he is aware enough to determine that there is a good or an evil. I agree with you that it is much easier to define when something is wrong. But almost all "good" as a choice of moral correctness, leaves wanting that good behaviour causing wrong or bad behaviour to some, so almost all choices we make on the correct path of what is supposed to be good, can somehow create an inherent harm to someone. A universal wrong is much easier to define because almost all universal rights can be wrong at some point in time.The best solution must not be to determine what will benefit the most but what will harm the least. I would like to say harm none, but then social interaction would cease.
Here's a link to the tweet, for anyone looking: https://twitter.com/NathanpmYoung/status/1656731102218682381
(In general I'd recommend including links to any mentioned sources in the body of the post. Unless this was an intentional omission, in which case sorry for undoing your carefully laid plans.)
I think the more important question (and possibly the one Nathan was intending to illicit, though I don't know) is how you count unique individuals at all.
The naive view of uniqueness, where a single person is a single computation being instantiated somewhere, has serious flaws. For example, there was a paper (I forget the name) that pointed out that you can build a two-dimensional water computer and run a human on it. You could then split the computer down the middle with the water flow completely undisrupted and now have two identical yet separate computers; does that suddenly create a second person? Or is the original water computer actually millions of people, one for each atomic width? Seems unintuitive either way.
The usual solution is to go with an informational conception of uniqueness, where a single person is defined by the information that comprises their mental states and experiences. Under this system, 1 million identical people are morally equivalent to a single person, regardless of whether their experiences are positive or negative. But this has its own problems, since it implies that simply creating a bitstring that describes a person experiencing suffering is the same as causing actual suffering.
I imagine you're already familiar with this field, but if not, WaitButWhy has a nice intro: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/what-makes-you-you.html
My general sense is that there's two types of people on person individualization questions, viz:
1. Those who think that 'a light goes on in the universe' when a new person is made.
2. Those who think the individualization of persons is primarily just a question of conceptual choice
Once you fully reject dualism and non-physicalism, 2 becomes almost unavoidable, once you accept 2, the idea that it's a values choice more than anything becomes more plausible, and a lot of people haven't yet grasped the radical implications of the debate.
Well I have written this before, and probably. From the ethical perspective of judeo-christianity , if one reads in genesis one that everything was created good, and then the man and women, which are neither of them singular, eat of the tree---it is a tree of knowledge of good and evil. Biblically speaking, the opposite of good, is not evil, and the teaching that it is does not at all conform "to the text." The text distinguishes the opposite of good is "knowledge of good and evil", or man's folly of deciding he is aware enough to determine that there is a good or an evil. I agree with you that it is much easier to define when something is wrong. But almost all "good" as a choice of moral correctness, leaves wanting that good behaviour causing wrong or bad behaviour to some, so almost all choices we make on the correct path of what is supposed to be good, can somehow create an inherent harm to someone. A universal wrong is much easier to define because almost all universal rights can be wrong at some point in time.The best solution must not be to determine what will benefit the most but what will harm the least. I would like to say harm none, but then social interaction would cease.