You have a wildly different concept of what the magic button does than I do. Rather than such a cataclysmic dystopian view, one of my assumptions as stated earlier is that it wouldn’t change their basic ideology or values, as we need a diversity of ideologies in the world. I would think of it more as evil people undergoing an epiphany, as people sometimes do when they go through a major life-changing event, and coming to the realization that having moral values makes the world a better place for everyone. Since this whole thing is magic anyway, I’m making the assumption that the magic operates in the most benign way possible, and leaves everything intact in these millions of evil people except the evil.
ETA: And I’m not interested in “sticking it” to anyone. That would be a contradiction to my basic premise. I’m just using the Trump goons as a real-life example of the extent of evil and corruption that’s out there.
You’ve got two minutes to decide whether it’s a total personality wipe or just an epiphany. Even if you thought there was just a 1% chance of a personality wipe, would you still press it?
There’s also the possibility that the button simply kills anyone that presses it on the basis that they’re ethically equivalent to Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and every other dictator combined.
I do find it funny that your position is at odds with virtually every bit of folklore ever written. Genie of the lamp, the Monkey’s Paw, etc. Why would anyone assume the button is benign?
You get a magic button that when pressed makes every single person in the world have the same morals and ideological beliefs as you. No one will know if you press it and their new beliefs will be with them until they die if you press it.
That doesn’t resemble what you describe at all. 8 billion people will have a core part of their personality destroyed and replaced with a permanent carbon copy of the existing beliefs of the button-presser. Zero diversity, zero capacity for change, zero capacity for judgement.
All those bits of folklore are basically espousing a kind of Biblical morality – that if you’re offered some great benefit for no discernible reason, then be careful what you wish for. The unstated religious/mystical implication is that it’s the temptation of the Devil.
I’m not wishing for anything here. I’m saying I would press the button provided that the stated assumptions I made were true, and I knew them to be true. If it were otherwise, I wouldn’t press it.
All I’m really saying here is that the world would be a much, much better place if there weren’t so many evil people, if everyone had an evolved sense of empathy and compassion. I don’t think there’s much there to disagree with.
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Ok, but now you have hard evidence that supernatural things exist. You should update your beliefs as to whether these stories are real or not, or at least if maybe they were constructed to warn against real magic that promises to fix everything with a flip of the switch.
What I disagree with is messing with people’s minds non-consentually no matter what the desired outcome.
I think it’s unethical for sufficiently charismatic real people to manipulate others, even if the outcome is positive. So of course I’d be against doing it magically.
For anyone who hesitates because they don’t want to harm or mind-wipe billions, think of the button as a quantum transporter. Pressing it doesn’t alter a single brain; it simply shifts you into a branch of the (infinite) Many-Worlds multiverse where every person already shares your core moral code and ideological beliefs. In other words, that world already exists—you’re just relocating. If physics allows a true “mirror” universe filled with the exact same people we know—only living by your values—that’s where you’d land. If that branch can’t exist (say your worldview is violently antisocial and couldn’t sustain seven-plus billion like-minded humans), the mechanism chooses the nearest viable branch instead—likely a less-populated, more dystopian Earth.
The trip is irreversible. Once you go, there’s no return ticket. Life in your new world might be more peaceful and more cooperative, or it might have sacrificed innovation and diversity to keep everyone aligned. Draw the dystopian branch and you’ll confront the fallout of values that don’t scale well. You won’t know which scenario awaits until you arrive (though you can make an educated guess if you know yourself), and you have just two minutes to decide.
Knowing the jump leaves this world untouched but strands you permanently—on a spectrum from near-utopia to a hellish echo—would you push the magic button under these conditions?
If you’re concerned about having altered friends and family, you can take them with you if you want (you’ll simply land on a world where they don’t already exist). You don’t have to worry about your pets since they will be exact copies.
That mostly eliminates the ethical downsides (though what if my friends and family don’t want to come along?) but also eliminates the benefits. The old universe is still there with all its suffering, and the new universe was already humming along before I got there.
So the only question left is whether I personally would rather live in that universe… and the answer is mostly no. I value diversity of thought a great deal.
Actually there is a serious problem. Let’s suppose the new universe is working nicely due to my superior morals and ideology. I bring my friends and family along… and they suddenly infect the populace with some ideological pathogens. They spread for the same reason they spread in our universe. So the act of transporting them there would be like transporting someone with smallpox to a population without natural defenses.
Your insistence upon morality and ideology as the sole components of personality make the discussion impossible. You have made your point numerous times and quite thoroughly. Maybe you could allow those of us with a more complex/nuanced view to continue our conversation?
Simply beating this simplistic drum is just adding a toxic note to the vibe.
Well, if your friends and family are anything like Jeffrey Dahmer, indeed that could be a problem. On the other hand, if they’re more like Betty White, they may improve that world.
And yes, the question shifts to, “where do you personally want to live?” If we do live in an infinite multi-verse, you have the option to have this version of you be conscious in a you-centric world. If your friends and family don’t want to join you, you’ll just have to live with you-centric copies of them.
Ideology is pulling more weight here than morality. Most people I know are moral enough. But a lot of them (most of them, really) have really awful ideologies. Ones that, in a world like you described, would probably result in the deaths of hundreds of millions.
But that’s like all of them! They’re fine as friends, but I wouldn’t trust them to decide which economic system we should embrace. Nor give the rest of the world any ideas if all they knew was one system.
I agree but whether or not changing someone’s beliefs and ideology counts as “killing” them warrants its own thread at some point after this one is finished. If I change Ted Bundy’s personality so that he isn’t a psychopath that wants to rape and kill women or Hitler’s personality so that he isn’t a fascist that wants to kill and enslave entire races, did I kill them in the meaningful sense of the word or merely improve them?
I never said that. However, they are key parts of the personality, and forcibly deleting and replacing them with an immutable program is both a huge violation and will either twist the rest of their personality to fit or drive them insane.
They’d be dead. Both because they wouldn’t really be people anymore, and because so much of their personality would be overwritten that there wouldn’t be much of the original left.
So, is your claim that people are simply “meat robots” whose entire response to all externalities is filtered entirely through their moral code and ideology? Because that’s what I’m getting here…
Or is it only people who are suddenly “converted” (for lack of a better word) to my moral code and ideology (without any change to their lived experiences or life circumstances) that suddenly become mindless automata?
There’s another aspect of this which is horrifying.
The button doesn’t just change my relationship with everyone else. It changes everyone’s relationship with everyone else. The man who married his wife due to her sharp wit–what happens when she’s overwritten with someone who only tells the mildest of jokes because they consider it immoral to be offensive? Or the person who goes out of their way to develop friendships with diverse ideologies–they are now identical, and the effort that went into that is lost. And so on.
So you haven’t just partially deleted 8 billion people. You’ve destroyed a trillion relationships as well.
Oh, but maybe the button also alters the memory of these relationships, so that the person in question never questions the difference, replacing any contradictory memories with something else. Well, that’s evil too.