Chapter 32
The Veil Of Ignorance And Why Every Life Matters
The philosopher John Rawls proposed a famous thought experiment called the "veil of ignorance." [18] Imagine you are designing the rules for a society, but you don't know what position you will occupy in that society. You don't know if you will be rich or poor, healthy or sick, talented or ordinary. Behind this "veil of ignorance," you would design rules that are fair to everyone, because you might end up being anyone.
Rawls intended this as a thought experiment, a hypothetical tool for thinking about justice. But the science of superimmortality suggests that the veil of ignorance is not hypothetical at all. It describes your actual situation.
Expanding the Moral Circle
If superimmortality is true, then the physical patterns that produce your ixperiencitness are not unique to your body. Similar patterns exist, in partial, fragmented, or approximate form, in many other conscious beings. The more similar a being's brain organization is to yours, the more ixperiencitness you share.
This does not mean you literally are every other person, or that you will personally experience their suffering. Ixperiencitness has boundaries, fuzzy boundaries, as we discussed, but real ones. A consciousness with very different organization from yours does not share your ixperiencitness, even under superimmortality.
But it does mean something important: the boundary between "self" and "other" is less sharp than we intuitively assume. You share fragments of ixperiencitness with many people, and the conditions that affect their conscious experience are relevant to the patterns of consciousness that overlap with yours.
Rawls's veil of ignorance was a thought experiment, a way to reason about justice by imagining you didn't know your position in society. Ixperiencit Theory suggests something related but different: not that you are literally behind a veil, but that the scope of consciousness you should care about is wider than the single body you currently inhabit. The well-being of other conscious beings is connected to the web of ixperiencitness of which you are a part.
None of this transforms Rawls's hypothetical into a literal fact. It would be overclaiming to say that you will experience every future life. But the fidentireplica web provides a naturalistic motivation for moral concern that extends far beyond your own body: the patterns that produce your consciousness are woven into the same fabric as the patterns that produce others' consciousness. Treating that fabric with care is both ethically right and, under superimmortality, rationally self-interested.
The Moral Implications
What follows is not empirical science; it is ethical reasoning that depends on the premises holding true. If the theory of ixperiencitness is correct, then these moral implications follow naturally. But they are implications, not observations, and the reader should weigh them accordingly.
Superimmortality does not provide a complete moral theory. But it does provide a powerful moral motivation: treat others as you would want to be treated, because you may literally be them, or they may be you, in a future existence.
This also means that compassion is not just morally good; it is rationally demanded. The suffering of others is not separate from your own potential suffering, because the structures and processes that produce their consciousness may be closely related to those that produce yours.
Different Versions of You, Different Conditions
The veil of ignorance becomes even more powerful when you consider the multiplicity of your ixperiencitness.
If many versions of you exist at the same time (bodies with your ixperiencitness living in different parts of the world, under different conditions) then you are currently experiencing multiple sets of circumstances. Some of your versions may be comfortable. Others may be suffering. The laws, rules, and social structures that appear to benefit one version may actively harm another.
No one knows for sure how many people share aspects of your ixperiencitness right now. The answer may depend on how broadly or narrowly we define "shared ixperiencitness." But whatever the number, the principle is clear: your well-being is not separable from the well-being of those who share your ixperiencitness. What you do to them, you do to yourself.
Key Terms in This Chapter
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The remaining text (examples, counter-arguments, and longer connective passages) is in the book.