this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2023
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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?
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.