At a certain point the psychological quality of life of living individuals that comes from living in a society with a certain structure and values may trump the right of individuals who thought they were dead to live once more.
This is vague. Can you pinpoint exactly why you think this would damage people’s psychological quality of life?
Yes, it was vague. I’ll try to be more precise—as much as I can.
Suppose we do a pilot experiment in a small region on the Tigris and Euphrates where people have been living in high population densities for a long time. We have large numbers of people coming back from the dead, perhaps 10 times the current population? Perhaps with infant mortality we have 5 times as many children as adults—lots of infants and young children.
But the UN is ready, prepared in advance. There is land for everyone. We figure at least that the dead have lost the right to their property, so we put them all up in modular housing we make outside the present city.
But there are so many formerly dead, from older linguistic and cultural and religious groups, that they form their own political parties and take over the government.
I could go on, but it’s apparent to me that the social order is completely messed up. Now suppose I’m an Egyptian, and it comes to a vote: Do we want to implement this program in Egypt? Assuming that the as-yet-unresurrected dead don’t get a vote, I can see the proposal being voted down overwhelmingly.
My moral intuition is that the Egyptians have no moral obligation to resurrect their ancestors. They have a right to continue their ways of existence.
Of course, this is an extreme thought experiment, and arguing about details won’t be productive.
I have a similar intuition about, say unrestricted immigration. If someone said that utility would be maximized if anyone could move anywhere on earth they wanted, I have an intuition that I as an American have a right to resist that. The status quo has some weight.
Applying rationality to problems can go too far. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a lot of very smart, very thoughtful, very knowledgeable people thought Communism was going to be a great idea. But due to a few slip-ups and miscalculations, it turned out it wasn’t—which we can see with hindsight. No, they didn’t have modern notions of rationalism, but they had the best thinking of their day.
A truism is that if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It’s easier to compute utility on the level of individuals. You can spin a story based on that about what society should look like, but I think you might be biased by the fact that your tool can apply. If the alternative is, “My tools don’t have anything to say on that issue because of complex interactions among people and the entire fabric of society”, then you would be biased to reject that alternative.
I know this brings up a lot of issues, some of which should be considered separately. And I am ignorant of a lot of LW work. Pointers to other work welcome.
If bringing back everyone at once is likely to be overwhelming, it would still be good to bring back, and assimilate into modern culture, a generation at a time.
So, the working assumption is that the future society with mass-resurrection magitech is still running on democracy? In that case, yeah, makes sense to hold off a bit. Say, long enough that the born-after-the-present people who retain our values outnumber the previously-dead. Still seems kinda slapdash, though.
This is vague. Can you pinpoint exactly why you think this would damage people’s psychological quality of life?
Yes, it was vague. I’ll try to be more precise—as much as I can.
Suppose we do a pilot experiment in a small region on the Tigris and Euphrates where people have been living in high population densities for a long time. We have large numbers of people coming back from the dead, perhaps 10 times the current population? Perhaps with infant mortality we have 5 times as many children as adults—lots of infants and young children.
But the UN is ready, prepared in advance. There is land for everyone. We figure at least that the dead have lost the right to their property, so we put them all up in modular housing we make outside the present city.
But there are so many formerly dead, from older linguistic and cultural and religious groups, that they form their own political parties and take over the government.
I could go on, but it’s apparent to me that the social order is completely messed up. Now suppose I’m an Egyptian, and it comes to a vote: Do we want to implement this program in Egypt? Assuming that the as-yet-unresurrected dead don’t get a vote, I can see the proposal being voted down overwhelmingly.
My moral intuition is that the Egyptians have no moral obligation to resurrect their ancestors. They have a right to continue their ways of existence.
Of course, this is an extreme thought experiment, and arguing about details won’t be productive.
I have a similar intuition about, say unrestricted immigration. If someone said that utility would be maximized if anyone could move anywhere on earth they wanted, I have an intuition that I as an American have a right to resist that. The status quo has some weight.
Applying rationality to problems can go too far. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a lot of very smart, very thoughtful, very knowledgeable people thought Communism was going to be a great idea. But due to a few slip-ups and miscalculations, it turned out it wasn’t—which we can see with hindsight. No, they didn’t have modern notions of rationalism, but they had the best thinking of their day.
A truism is that if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It’s easier to compute utility on the level of individuals. You can spin a story based on that about what society should look like, but I think you might be biased by the fact that your tool can apply. If the alternative is, “My tools don’t have anything to say on that issue because of complex interactions among people and the entire fabric of society”, then you would be biased to reject that alternative.
I know this brings up a lot of issues, some of which should be considered separately. And I am ignorant of a lot of LW work. Pointers to other work welcome.
If bringing back everyone at once is likely to be overwhelming, it would still be good to bring back, and assimilate into modern culture, a generation at a time.
So, the working assumption is that the future society with mass-resurrection magitech is still running on democracy? In that case, yeah, makes sense to hold off a bit. Say, long enough that the born-after-the-present people who retain our values outnumber the previously-dead. Still seems kinda slapdash, though.