X-Message-Number: 14198
Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2000 20:31:31 -0700
From: Mike Perry <>
Subject: Repeated Experience

Lee Corbin, #14192, writes
>
>Mike Perry in post #14183 has seemed to say that repeated
>experience is of no account.
>
It seems to me that one is stuck with each experience being infinitely
instantiated, if there is a multiverse such as David Deutsch imagines in
*The Fabric of Reality*, and which I echo in my book too. It can't be
avoided. But I wouldn't go so far as to say that "one infinity is as good as
another"-- a stance of benevolence could and should at least be devoted to
making the bad times statistically infrequent. So to your question about
neo-Nazis setting up exact conditions of torture again, no, it would be
proper to intervene and prevent this from happening. The intervention would,
of course, introduce a new element that was not present the first time--it
would be a different story with a happier ending.  That alone is of positive
value, though it would not erase the bad thing that also happened and will
happen over and over. But trying to do good, and make the bad less frequent,
should have advangages (I think very substantial advantages) in terms of
enlightened self-interest, and that is really the basic reason to pursue
such a course.

Mike Perry 

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