Hmm, let’s see. So I guess to start it matters what we consider a person. Certainly a person is a thing, and I think we should also suppose by person we mean a phenomenally conscious thing. I’m fairly willing to grant all such things personhood, though others may not be, but I think we can at least start approaching this question by supposing that persons are at least phenomenally conscious things.
In this scenario, what matters? I’d argue that value comes from the telos assigned to noemata, both intrinsically by being the object of an intentional relation and by other noemata putting valued noemata (what I call “axias”) into relationships with telos. So if we ask what matters to a person (a phenomenally conscious thing) we answer that what matters is whatever matters to them, i.e. whatever it is they value by virtue of the configuration of their thoughts.
Now to turn to the question, properly I think there is no way we can say Alice exists in both A and C. What we can instead say is perhaps that some successor to Alice exists in both A and C (let’s call them Aalice and Calice) and then we could ask if Alice, the person who existed prior to A and C diverging, would prefer to be Aalice or Calice. We could also ask Aalice if she would rather be Calice and Calice if she would rather have been Aalice, although in some ways this question is meaningless because it supposes a counterfactual that could not have been: if Aalice had been Calice then she would have just always been Calice and never Aalice and vice versa. This also suggests how we should feel about comparing A and C to B: there is no sense in which Alice, Aalice, or Calice could have existed in B and have B still be B, so we’re unable to directly say whether A or B is better for Alice.
I’ve not fully thought this through, but what this seems to suggest to me is that we can’t reasonably compare A, B, and C except insofar as we can compare them relative to the preferences of persons who existed prior to their diverging, and then only so far as asking persons in the primordial world which world they would prefer, although even this is complicated since metaphysically it seems likely that all three worlds will exist but be cut off from each other causally, so primordial persons would end up in all three worlds anyway and their preference in some sense doesn’t matter except insofar as it may increase the measure of worlds “similar” to A, B, or C, although what similar means is also a bit unclear here.
So I guess I don’t have much of an answer for you beyond suggesting that trying to compare between possible worlds is a confused question because it’s asking us to do something that only seems possible because of the way we can imagine possible worlds without them being grounded in their histories. That is, the question to compare worlds asks us to do something that is physically impossible and only makes sense within an ontology that fails to fully account for the way different worlds come to exist.
To be fair this is at odds with our experience of living since it often feels like we make choices to pick between different future worlds we will find ourselves in, but this may as much be an illusion created by only being able to see the world from the inside.
Hmm, let’s see. So I guess to start it matters what we consider a person. Certainly a person is a thing, and I think we should also suppose by person we mean a phenomenally conscious thing. I’m fairly willing to grant all such things personhood, though others may not be, but I think we can at least start approaching this question by supposing that persons are at least phenomenally conscious things.
In this scenario, what matters? I’d argue that value comes from the telos assigned to noemata, both intrinsically by being the object of an intentional relation and by other noemata putting valued noemata (what I call “axias”) into relationships with telos. So if we ask what matters to a person (a phenomenally conscious thing) we answer that what matters is whatever matters to them, i.e. whatever it is they value by virtue of the configuration of their thoughts.
Now to turn to the question, properly I think there is no way we can say Alice exists in both A and C. What we can instead say is perhaps that some successor to Alice exists in both A and C (let’s call them Aalice and Calice) and then we could ask if Alice, the person who existed prior to A and C diverging, would prefer to be Aalice or Calice. We could also ask Aalice if she would rather be Calice and Calice if she would rather have been Aalice, although in some ways this question is meaningless because it supposes a counterfactual that could not have been: if Aalice had been Calice then she would have just always been Calice and never Aalice and vice versa. This also suggests how we should feel about comparing A and C to B: there is no sense in which Alice, Aalice, or Calice could have existed in B and have B still be B, so we’re unable to directly say whether A or B is better for Alice.
I’ve not fully thought this through, but what this seems to suggest to me is that we can’t reasonably compare A, B, and C except insofar as we can compare them relative to the preferences of persons who existed prior to their diverging, and then only so far as asking persons in the primordial world which world they would prefer, although even this is complicated since metaphysically it seems likely that all three worlds will exist but be cut off from each other causally, so primordial persons would end up in all three worlds anyway and their preference in some sense doesn’t matter except insofar as it may increase the measure of worlds “similar” to A, B, or C, although what similar means is also a bit unclear here.
So I guess I don’t have much of an answer for you beyond suggesting that trying to compare between possible worlds is a confused question because it’s asking us to do something that only seems possible because of the way we can imagine possible worlds without them being grounded in their histories. That is, the question to compare worlds asks us to do something that is physically impossible and only makes sense within an ontology that fails to fully account for the way different worlds come to exist.
To be fair this is at odds with our experience of living since it often feels like we make choices to pick between different future worlds we will find ourselves in, but this may as much be an illusion created by only being able to see the world from the inside.