No, that’s what the resulting meat robots will be. They’ll have an unchangeable program in their heads forcing them to think in a particular way regardless of their past, their experiences, or their desires. Their personalities will becomes twisted into machines with no other function than to serve the program, regardless of the cost. Much like what addictions do to the personality of an addict but worse.
On this point, let’s assume that everything you said applies (that changing morality also ruins relationships, universally and catastrophically).
I’d still push the button, I think. None of us believe that pushing that button would be free of side effects. It’s just that we think the benefits might be worth the costs.
Even if relationships were totally changed, they could be rebuilt. 8 billion people would lose many connections but have the opportunity to form more, and possibly deeper ones, with other people, animals, places, etc. Compatibility of ideology would no longer really be a thing any more than “must also breathe oxygen”, it’d just be taken for granted. But you could still form diverse friendships based on individual backgrounds, cultures, preferences, foods, sports, games, hobbies, and yes, personalities. Morality surely interacts with all of those things in various subtle and profound ways, but it isn’t a 1:1 equivalent to them. People have morals, not are morals.
It’s not that I look forward in particular to the Great Beigeification of everyone’s beliefs and personalities. It’s just that that dystopia seems less catastrophic than the current dystopia we’re spiraling towards. Given the choice of becoming hive-minded ants or hurtling towards extinction and taking most of the planet with us, the former still seems preferable…
Maybe just move to the Neutral Planet…
I think by your own reasoning they could only possibly go insane or suicidal if the person who pressed the button was on that trajectory toward insanity and suicide, when they pressed the button, because
and
Just to be clear, I wouldn’t press the button, and my reasons are similar to yours (destructive override of personality), but I don’t interpret the action of this button as creating immutable robots.
This scenario strongly reminds me of various mind control fetish stories I’ve read, with the exception that the stories usually acknowledge that it’s horrifying to have your mind reprogrammed according to someone else’s benefit.
The OP says they’ll maintain the imposed beliefs and ideology for life; that makes them immutable.
To you; to me, it seems worse than extinction. All of humanity being mindraped into compliance is horrific. And I expect the post-mindrape children would be abused, being raised by parents who have no regard for human freedom (or the button wouldn’t have been pressed) and who are incapable of changing their opinions on the matter.
Also, notably we wouldn’t get a choice between reprogramming or extinction, we’d be mindslaved without warning or recourse. There’s no option to choose suicide instead.
Sure. I wouldn’t expect everyone to agree, pre Red Button. Afterward, I’d be curious to see what they think of the decision a few generations later, in retrospect.
Like others here, I don’t agree with your premise that the decision would be immutable if the underlying ideology itself accommodates moral flexibility, but that’s not a point we have to belabor.
Race ya to the button? You can destroy it if you get there first.
So by your own reasoning, it is impossible that they would become insane or suicidal, because that’s a change and immutable things don’t change.
No, only their “morals and ideological beliefs” become unchangable, not the rest of them. That’s part of what is likely to drive them to suicide* or insanity, it sounds a lot like descriptions of dysphoria to me. They’ll know that their beliefs are wrong, imposed on them, but be unable to disagree with them.
- Of course, this option only remains open if the imposed ideology allows suicide. If it doesn’t they’ll have no choice but to suffer, no matter their emotional of physical suffering. Mindslaves don’t get choices.
OK, but this doesn’t seem very consistent with other statements you’ve made elsewhere in the thread about the button turning people into automatons, meat puppets, being unable to change their minds, and being compelled to act as they are programmed and no longer being themselves, opinons and desires having been destroyed.
I think this probably reflects your own views on the inevitability and extent to which ideology drives the daily lives and actions of humans, and I think we probably don’t align on that, but within this thread, I don’t think you’ve been consistent on stating the extent to which you believe this change would affect things.
I agree that the permanent impression of a set of beliefs on the recipients is an extraordinary factor that would certainly limit the scope or breadth of changes that might otherwise have happened later, so people do become ideologically locked, and this is a significant violation or injury to them (regardless how good the imposed ideology might seem to be), but I don’t think this equates to a personality-wipe, any more than it is a personality-wipe if someone adopts or abandons an ideology after being evangelised or disillusioned.
Everyone whose morals and ideological beliefs already align with yours would stay essentially the same—no real change there. No brain-wipe.
Those whose morals are worse than yours would shift upward toward your level; the farther they diverge, the bigger the improvement—and the most brain-wipe. To me, that benefit outweighs the risk.
The catch is with people whose morals and beliefs are better than yours. They’d slide downward, and the more they diverge, the more they’d lose/be altered.
So the quick calculus:
Moral compass near true north? Push the button—you raise the bottom tier, barely dent the top, and net a kinder world.
Cackling super-villain in training? Keep your mitts off the button— you’d drag everyone down and hurt the best among us.
TL;DR: high morals = green light; low morals = red light.
Trouble is, we’re terrible at objectively measuring whether we are right or wrong, good or bad.
That, plus @Tibby is apparently assuming that moral beliefs are one-dimensionally ordered—that where two people’s beliefs differ, one must be better than the other.
So anyone who would push the button believes that it would be a good thing to do so: that the benefits would be worth the costs. Which means that, after pressing it, everyone would believe that, so everyone would be happy that you’d pressed it.
At least at first. Maybe those beliefs would change after everyone saw the results?
Or could they? OP said “their new beliefs will be with them until they die”—does that mean they’d be incapable of learning from experience? Would you still be able to revise your beliefs? Would that put you at odds with the whole rest of the world if your beliefs can change and theirs can’t?
People with identical morals and ideology can be very different from each other. The button doesn’t eliminate personality or consciousness, it just aligns morals and ideology.
I’m not egotistic enough to think that my morals and ideology are so pristine that no human who shared them would ever commit a crime. Put me in a bad enough situation and I’m likely going to do a bad thing. So too, my inherent deficiencies as a person aren’t morality based or ideology based, it’s just that I’m human.
I do think that aligning ideology would do wonders to eliminate conflict and suffering around the world, even if it’s not my ideology.
I didn’t think I had to explicitly say this but they don’t have an issue with the change or anything like dysphoria.
Since you think a moral/ideological change like this is akin to killing the person, do you think when someone’s beliefs change the normal way in our world that the original person is “dead”?
If I’m far right when I’m 15 and a socialist when I’m 20 (or vice versa), do you think the 15 year old me is dead?
Would it be a good thing to push a magic button that made all women compulsively submissive and agreeable to men and perpetually horny? Just think of how that would solve conflict between the genders!
And that’s exactly the same argument that the people in favor of pushing the button the OP are making.
That’s the old “slavery is good if the slave is mind controlled to enjoy it” argument.
In this scenario, the moral yardstick is you. Push the button and you’re whisked to a universe calibrated to your personal code—no external scorekeeper required.
Do you think your compass (mine’s primarily set to animal rights, non-aggression, equality, and diversity) can scale to seven-plus billion souls? Great! You’ll land in a society where those values already run the show, lifting the worst actors (in your view) and barely altering the best.
If you’re wrong, you—not some innocent bystander—get to live with the fallout. So the gamble is yours alone, and the proof of your ethics will be the world you wake up in.
In many cases that’s effectively what happens, yes. I constantly see people talk like that about friends and relatives who have gotten sucked into Trumpism; that the person they knew is effectively gone.
And this would be worse. Especially with “don’t have an issue with the change or anything like dysphoria”, since that means even more of their personality is overwritten. They’ll know that their beliefs are fake and forced on them, but apparently won’t care. Their past self will be dead to themselves, too.
Would it be a good thing to push a magic button that made all men compulsively anti-domestic violence, anti-toxic masculinity, pro women’s health care, and make them consider women genuine equals?
Oh noes, brainwashing is evil, we should let things be the way they are. Sorry ladies, good luck with rape avoidance and I hope you can still get reproductive care… we had a chance to make men less of a pile of assholes, but it would’ve been wrong.
Of course, not pressing the button would lead to the same outcomes.
No, because that would be enslaving them. But of course you avoid my point; people are defending mindraping humanity because the imagined results are ones they approve of. It’s far less appealing when they are presented with the same scenario but a different ideology. They are imagining being the mindraper, not the mindraped.