Yes, that seems like a reasonable way to state more rigorously the distinction between systems I might care about and systems I categorically don't care about.

Though, thinking about Permutation City a bit more... we, as readers of the novel, have access to the frame in which Peer's consciousness manifests. The residents of PC don't have access to it; Peer is no easier for them to access than the infinite number of other consciousnesses they could in principle "detect" within their architecture.

So we care about Peer, and they don't, and neither of us cares about the infinite number of Peer's peers. Makes sense.

But there is a difference: their history includes the programming exploit that created the space in which Peer exists, and the events that led to Peer existing within it. One can imagine a resident of PC finding those design notes and building a gadget based on them to encounter Peer, and this would not require implausible amounts of either energy or luck.

And I guess the existence of those design notes would make me care more about Peer than about his peers, were I a resident of PC... which is exactly what I'd predict from this theory.

OK, then.