The diagnosis: why binary abolition is ill-posed in Everettia

Under unitary evolution, the universal wavefunction never deletes histories. Given generic initial conditions and decoherence, every physically consistent continuation — the worlds where paradise-engineering succeeds, and the worlds where sentients decline the recipe, where civilizations collapse before the transition, where whole biospheres burn — carries nonzero amplitude support. Nor can HI fall back on counting worlds: decoherent histories form a continuum, and "number of branches" is not a physical quantity. Only Born measure is. So "no suffering anywhere, ever" does not name a physically reachable state, and ought implies can.

The reframe: amplitude steering, not outcome selection

What unitarity does permit is redistribution of amplitude. No action chooses which futures exist; actions steer Born measure across the space of future histories. HI must therefore be restated in the only currency the multiverse recognizes:

where $S(\omega)$ is the integrated suffering along history $\omega$ (intensity × duration × scope) and $\rho_\pi$ is the Born-measure density over futures under policy $\pi$. Note that Deutsch–Wallace decision theory already tells rational Everettian agents to maximize Born-weighted expectation — so measure-theoretic HI is just negative utilitarianism with the ontological honesty that all terms in the expectation are actualized somewhere, and only their weights answer to us.

The plea, restated

Abolition was never physics' to grant. The universal wavefunction will not forget agony; it holds, at some amplitude, every history in which pain burns. What we may ask of the multiverse — and owe to it — is not that no branch contain suffering, but that suffering's share of what is actual be made vanishingly small: that the Born-weighted measure of misery across the branches be driven toward its infimum, and that the amplitude mass of the wavefunction come to rest, almost entirely, on histories in which no sentient being suffers. Not a world without suffering — a multiverse in which suffering survives only in branches almost nobody, by measure, inhabits.

"Phasing out the biology of suffering" was gradient language all along; Everett simply makes the gradient fundamental.

What survives, what changes

• Within-branch abolition keeps full meaning. The high-measure branch — the one carrying almost all of your successors' self-locating measure — can genuinely be a zero-suffering civilization. Local abolition is what you purchase with amplitude.
• Efficacy is restored, not diminished. Binary HI under Everett would render every choice futile (bad branches exist regardless). Measure-HI makes every amplitude shift an irrecoverable moral gain — the only kind unitarity allows.
• The program is asymptotic. The infimum is generally not attained; no policy zeroes the suffering sector's support. This fits HI's own self-image as an open-ended civilizational enterprise rather than a terminus.
• Anti-quantum-suicide corollary. Tiny-measure branches are still actual, and the suffering in them is really lived. Everett does not dilute the wrongness of agony; it relocates moral seriousness from bare existence to weight. What obligation tracks is not whether a suffering branch exists, but how much of reality it consumes.

Two honest caveats

1. Infinite multiverses break the naive sum. If the multiverse is spatially infinite or Boltzmann-fluctuation-riddled, "minimize measure" needs regularization — the cosmological measure problem is inherited by the ethics.
2. The binary intuition doesn't fully die. Someone may insist that one tortured branch is one too many, whatever its amplitude. The measure-theoretic reply: that intuition, taken seriously under unitarity, obligates the impossible; the strongest coherent residue of it is precisely the demand that the torture's measure be squeezed without remainder toward zero — which is what restated HI is.