DanielVarga comments on Torture Simulated with Flipbooks - Less Wrong

9 Post author: Amanojack 26 May 2011 01:00AM

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

Comments (31)

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

Comment author: DanielVarga 27 May 2011 12:43:30AM 1 point [-]

I happen to agree with you 100%, but let me note that this line of reasoning has some strange conclusions. It implies that it is the same to torture one computer-simulated consciousness to torturing 100 clones of him at the same time the same way. But when one of the simulations has an accidental bit-flip due to hardware error, it is not the same anymore. Similarly, if you torture 100 different computer-simulated consciousnesses by a deterministic process, but during the simulation two of them become identical, it means that now there are only 99 people tortured.

Comment author: Icelus 07 June 2011 07:25:47AM 0 points [-]

I'm undecided on how to treat 'running the exact same torture sim (say as a flipbook of instructions)' but I'm leaning towards it being increasingly morally worse the more time one runs the simulation because of one thing that sticks out to me: that if you complete the torture sim then ask the person in the sim if they think they're a person, if they think it's okay to torture them because they're a copy, etc they're going to have every reason/argument a human in meatspace has against torture being done to them.