Dilemma
Does deleting your data online destroy something real?
Account deletion, the right to be forgotten, the obsolescence of file formats, the slow decay of digital archives — whether any of this destroys something that was real depends on whether information is the kind of thing that can be destroyed.
Context
Digital lives accumulate: photos, messages, posts, purchase histories, biometric signatures, the slow behavioural fingerprint a person leaves across services. Some of it gets deliberately deleted — for privacy, for regret, for legal compliance; some decays as platforms shut down or migrate; some is preserved indefinitely by actors the person never consented to. Whether deletion (or decay) destroys something morally significant turns on whether the information ever had the kind of standing that destruction would matter for.
Why it matters
GDPR's right to erasure, archival ethics, the question of what we owe future historians, the moral weight of an estate's digital footprint — all bear on whether deletion destroys or merely changes status. The framing shapes both policy and personal practice around what to keep, what to delete, and what to insist on being deletable.
The coordinates that split the schools
The stances
Information at the cosmic level isn't destroyed; deletion only obscures access.
62 schoolsOn this view, information is fundamentally preserved by the structure of reality. Deletion removes accessibility but not the information itself — at the physics level (entropy preserves what was), at the cosmic-record level (the consequences ripple forward), at the divine-memory level for the religious schools in the cluster. Privacy policy is a useful and important social arrangement, but it isn't metaphysical annihilation.
Where this stance leads ⓘ
- 1% Information is conserved — the personal pattern is held even when an individual mind loses it. on Is anything truly lost when someone forgets?
- 1% The information that constitutes a person is conserved; restoration is in principle possible. on Could the dead, in principle, be brought back?
- 1% The offense persists ontologically; forgiveness is real moral work, but it doesn't erase what was. on Is forgiveness ontologically possible?
- 1% No — continuous divine sustaining act, the Tao that knows no joints, the One's self-disclosure. on Is reality fundamentally digital?
- 1% No — continuous divine presence; consciousness is the unbroken witness. on Are there indivisible units of experience?
Information is genuinely lost when the substrate that hosted it goes; deletion really destroys.
50 schoolsOn this view, information is what its substrate does; remove the substrate (the file, the disk, the platform) and the information is gone. Deletion is real destruction; the right to be forgotten enacts something metaphysically real, not just procedurally convenient.
Where this stance leads ⓘ
- 1% Information is lost when a mind forgets; matter and energy continue, but the pattern is gone. on Is anything truly lost when someone forgets?
- 1% The information dissipates with the substrate; restoration is in principle impossible. on Could the dead, in principle, be brought back?
- 1% The offense is locally constituted by its substrate; when the substrate dissolves, the offense genuinely passes away. on Is forgiveness ontologically possible?
- 1% Moral obligation tracks the relations one is in; distance does matter, structurally. on Does environmental harm in another country bind me morally?
- 1% Prayer changes the pray-er, not the prayed-for. on Can prayer for someone far away affect them?
Information persists where it is held; deletion releases what isn't held elsewhere.
15 schoolsOn these views, information persists or doesn't depending on whether something is sustaining it. What is held in divine memory or in active communal practice continues; what is held only by the deleted artifact is genuinely released. The variable conservation maps onto a variable moral weight for deletion.
Where this stance leads ⓘ
- 1% Information persists or doesn't depending on whether the holder is sustained. on Is anything truly lost when someone forgets?
- 1% What is held by God or sustaining practice can be restored; what isn't can't. on Could the dead, in principle, be brought back?
- 1% The offense persists where sustained and releases where conditionally absolved; forgiveness is real ontological work. on Is forgiveness ontologically possible?
- 1% The future is open and you are a genuine origin of it. on Do you really choose?
- 1% The addict could have chosen otherwise — that's why recovery is real. on Are addicts responsible for their addiction?
Nothing is fundamentally conserved; deletion is just routine impermanence.
3 schoolsOn this view, neither information nor the substrate that hosts it is fundamentally conserved. Deletion is no different from the ordinary process by which everything decays. Whether to mourn it depends on whether to mourn the more general impermanence.
Schools the coordinates don't place
These schools don't satisfy any stance's coordinate pattern strongly enough to be assigned — either because they decline to commit on the question (Confucianism is famously silent on what comes after; Pyrrhonian and pragmatist traditions suspend judgment), or because their attribute signature crosses categories in a way the five buckets don't capture.
Related Experiments
Experiments engaging the same dimensions as this dilemma — they\'re where the same questions get stress-tested in cleaner cases.
Related Historical Debates
Historical confrontations where parties argued out questions on these dimensions.