Nick_Tarleton comments on Hedging our Bets: The Case for Pursuing Whole Brain Emulation to Safeguard Humanity's Future - Less Wrong

11 Post author: inklesspen 01 March 2010 02:32AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (244)

Comments (244)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 08 March 2010 11:09:08AM 1 point [-]

Second, thanks to the hedonic treadmill, any randomly-selected form of torture repeated indefinitely would eventually become tolerable, then boring.

What if your hedonic treadmill were disabled, or bypassed by something like direct stimulation of your pain center?

Comment author: gregconen 08 March 2010 08:52:48PM 2 points [-]

First, the scenario you describe explicitly includes death, and as such falls under the 'embellishments' exception.

You're going to die (or at least cease) eventually, unless our understanding of physics changes significantly. Eventually, you'll run out of negentropy to run your thoughts. My scenario only changes what happens between then and now.

Failing that, you can just be tortured eternally, with no chance of escape (no chance of escape is unphysical, but so is no chance of death). Even if the torture becomes boring (and there may be ways around that), an eternity of boredom, with no chance to succeed any at any goal, seems worse than death to me.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit