Question of Evil

[jack]

If you were the God, and all possible parallel universes existed side-by-side, what would you do? Would you delete most, or transform them into copies of the one where people were happiest? Or let them run?

To me, that thought experiment relates to several questions:

* The problem of evil "If God existed, and were omnipotent and good, why would he let there be bad things". If you can even conceive of God not reordering all his universes to be "best", that is one possible answer to the question. (Not that I think that's true, but it's possibly a rebuttal to the argument that "There are bad things, therefore God is at most two of good, omnipotent, and existing")

* A logical extension of local morality. People naturally care more for people close to them (both friends, and people similar to them, and people physically closer to them). To a greater or lesser extent depending on circumstance. This has bad effects, that far away tragedies can get ignored, but good effects, that people can choose to help some people close to them, even if this is a drop in the ocean compared to everything else, but a lot better than just freezing up. But if all possible parallel universes existed, it would make it obvious how every thing you chose to do was an essentially arbitrary decision about how people close to you matter more than everyone else,

Comments

[simont]

If you were the God, and all possible parallel universes existed side-by-side, what would you do?

That's a deeply weird premise and I'm not sure I can even begin to tackle it without quite a lot of clarification. What is causing all possible parallel universes to exist in the first place?

Was it some underlying metaphysical principle? In which case, if I delete or modify some of them, will the rest come back, or will another infinity of possible parallel universes diverge from the ones I leave as starting points, or what?

Or did I cause all possible parallel universes to exist? In which case, my motivation for so doing would presumably be relevant. Or was it my predecessor in the God job from whom I've now taken over and have the chance to enact changes of policy? In that case, did he leave any mission statements, design notes or other useful documentation regarding what he was attempting to achieve thereby?

Are we inside or outside time? If outside, how does deleting a parallel universe help anyway – surely, merely from its existence at any point in my subjective meta-time, its inhabitants have already existed and undergone all of their happiness and/or suffering and it's far too late for me to do anything about it?

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Fair warning; this is a subject on which I can natter nigh-endlessly

* The problem of evil "If God existed, and were omnipotent and good, why would he let there be bad things". If you can even conceive of God not reordering all his universes to be "best", that is one possible answer to the question. (Not that I think that's true, but it's possibly a rebuttal to the argument that "There are bad things, therefore God is at most two of good, omnipotent, and existing")

It just reformulates the problem, though. If there exists a set of all possible parallel universes, why has the postulated value of God chosen for this iteration of me to experience this particular parallel rather than any of the trivially imaginable ones that are better than this one is some straightforward obvious ways ?

* A logical extension of local morality. People naturally care more for people close to them (both friends, and people similar to them, and people physically closer to them). To a greater or lesser extent depending on circumstance.

I have a strong query against that "naturally", and an even stronger against it being a reasonable basis for moral consideration if it happens that it is in our nature.

It seems pretty obvious to me, looking at the general course of human history, that the ability to build a civilisation, with all the advantages of civilisation such as penicillin, the internet, the rule of law and so on, requires an expansion of the range of empathy, of what counts as "us" and what "them"; if you're incapable of grasping that anyone outside your little hunter-gather tribe is also a person, you're never going to be able to build a city. This indicates that this aspect of human nature is mutable and to my mind the logical extension of this is that one maximises potential by regarding the entire species as "us"; nationalism seems to me to be a particularly weird aberration on a scale intemediate between the city and the species, and the sooner we can be rid of it the better.

[hilarityallen.livejournal.com]

If God were good, why would She allow evil universes to persist?

Is a God running an experiment able to be a Good God?

Those seem to me to be the obvious problems with the first associated question you rise.

As for the second, it seems evident to me that the long term survival of the human race is predicated precisely on the ability to make decisions based on a more-than-local morality. We devise governmental systems that are pretty much dependent on an idea of the common good.

As for your main question, I think that you're actually asking whether God has empathy, and if so, does it override your experiment? Does God regard humans as independant entities (as we regard ourselves) or as we regard bacteria (i.e. entities governed by a set of simple rules and conditions)?

(Actually, that last makes me ask the question: are we making unwarranted assumptions about the sentience of bacteria and other species?

[pizza.maircrosoft.com (from livejournal.com)]

There was a super monkey article about that local morality thing that has stuck in my head ever since; that people/monkeys only have room in their heads to care about a certain number of people at any one time and everyone else, cars passing on the motorway, the invisible people who provide services, the people dying of starvation every three seconds (how many is that since you started writing this comment? If they were my family I wouldn't be poncing around on LJ), just so many trees.

The people who complain about Local Council, some arbitrary Them who are failing to do things, but once you've met Pete and June and Adrian they aren't a Them any more they are a person doing their best and don't deserve this random criticism...

The way people in backwater Scottish villages treat you as a friend when you amble into their village shop and people on the London commuter trains treat you as a tree.

Anyway, apparently it's a feature of our brains, although I don't think that can be quite true, at least it's possible to learn to care more, I think.

As for the all possible universes thing, it seems to me that if they did they would *have* to, somehow, that they would do because that would be the way the worlduniversemultiverse worked and you wouldn't be able to just delete some of them at random, or change things in one without something popping up elsehwere.
(I don't mean that this is a logical requirement of such a thing or anything, only that that's what I think would have to be the case. ugh.)

[rochvelleth.livejournal.com]

Please bear in mind that I'm not exactly 'good', so...

I'd have a lot of different worlds running at once. In fact, I think I'd be a sort of divine The Sims player. I'd do lots of experimenting with history, and then I'd understand Dr Who.

But seriously though, if I were God, and I were good and omnipotent and omniscient, I'd create mankind and then leave them to it, and there would only be one version of that. I think.

But I think maybe you're giving me too much control over the situation ;)

[liv]

I'm sorry, I can't deal with counterfactuals about what would happen if I were God. An entity who could reasonably be described as me could not possibly be anything reasonably described as God. (Yes, this does mean that Christianity is literally unthinkable in my mindset, sorry Christians.)

If I were an extremely powerful being in charge of the universe, well. I think I probably wouldn't create the universe in the first place. Because any possible form of existence could always be improved upon. I could create a bunch of sentient beings for the sole purpose of experiencing eternal bliss, I suppose, which would mean I'd create heaven without creating earth. But I don't know how much of a point there would be to that. Anything short of that, though, could lead to my creatures questioning whether I was really good.

[d37373.livejournal.com]

Well, given all possible parallel universes, it's pretty obvious that I'm going to do Everything. This is true irrespective of my Godhood, and in fact guarantees it.

At this point, it all becomes a matter of probabilities, and my maths is only sufficient to return NaN.

(BTW, how are you dealing with the universes in which there are no parallel universes?)

[minipoppy.livejournal.com]

I think I would have to argue against God getting rid of the bad universes, for wouldn't that include deleting ours?