What leads some people to enjoy torturing sims, anyway?
Some fiction writers report that a sufficiently well-developed fictional character has some degree of cognitive independence — perhaps as much as a "part" in the IFS sense — and struggle with the idea of doing horrible things to their carefully-created characters in order to produce engaging fiction. How seriously should this metaphor be taken?
On the other hand, the motivation behind explicitly mistreating sims as illustrated in the VGCats comic CronoDAS linked to, seems to be less productive and more morbid: less like posing hard problems and struggles for a character, and more like bullying a weaker kid or pulling the wings off flies.
Given that a simulation game is created by a game designer and played by players, some of this could be explained as testing the limits of the game, or revealing the (possibly unintended!) consequences of the game's design. If your game is sold as a brightly-colored domestic setting where the ostensible goal is to make a small family of sims very happy, then it is noteworthy if the winning conditions can be equally satisfied by casting Parfit's repugnant conclusion to create a hell-world packed with a teeming incestuous horde of sims who are each borderline-suicidal.
Presumably, at some point people get bored with this sort of thing. A person who constructs one simulated finite hell-world, then shuts it down and moves on to go to something else, is not especially worrisome. A person who spends days on end constructing larger and more elaborate hells is probably presumed to be somewhat deranged.
Yet at the same time, why should the simulated-misery of a simulated-being bear any moral significance for us? If you replaced the sampled-audio screams of "Oh God! No!" with "Oh God! Yes!" and replaced the graphics of bruises and tears with graphics of delight and pleasure, would this change anything? Is the sim-torturer problematic to us because they enjoy creating things that look like pain, or because they create simulated conditions that actually count as pain?
Is the sim-torturer problematic to us because they enjoy creating things that look like pain, or because they create simulated conditions that actually count as pain?
Because they create conditions that actually count as pain.
What leads someone to enjoy torturing sims - what leads someone to enjoy torturing people?
When I was reading The Seven Biggest Dick Moves in the History of Gaming, I was struck by the number of people who are strongly motivated to cause misery to others [1], apparently for its own sake. I think the default assumption here is that the primary risk to ems is from errors in programming an AI, but cruelty from other ems, from silicon minds closely based on humans but not ems (is there a convenient term for this?) and from just plain organic humans strikes me as extremely likely.
We're talking about a species where a significant number of people feel better when they torture Sims. I don't think torturing Sims is of any moral importance, but it serves as an indicator about what people like to do. I also wonder how good a simulation has to be before torturing it does matter.
I find it hard to imagine a system where it's easy to upload people which has security so good that torturing copies wouldn't be feasible, but maybe I'm missing something.
[1] The article was also very funny. I point this out only because I feel a possibly excessive need to reassure readers that I have normal reactions.