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AdeleneDawner comments on Local Ordinances of Fun - Less Wrong
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Well, how would you answer my hypothetical?
And suppose I rephrased it thus: your friend needs help say, getting through a painful divorce, and you knew that this will be a difficult process taking many years. But you also know that if you put yourself in an experience machine for the rest of your life, you could soothe your (virtual) friend's wounded soul in half an hour. Supposing the move to the experience machine doesn't interfere with any of your other plans (they could be simulated too, of course), would you consider the experience machine simply a more efficient means to your end? Or would it fail to achieve your end at all?
If my actual friend is actually hurting, my goal is to actually fix that; a simulation of the individual isn't relevant to that. But I don't care very much about people who aren't my friends, in most cases, so if it's a choice of becoming friends with real person Alex, who might get hurt and need support that I can't give, or simulated person Abe, who won't present me with any problems that I can't actually solve, I might well choose Abe, so long as Abe is as interesting as Alex in every other way.
My point was just that we would resist the experience machine if we took ourselves to have ethical obligations or a chance to do something good in the world we live in. 'Real' isn't quite the issue here, since if you started in the experience machine you might justifiably want to stay there instead of moving to another one or into the real world.
In other words, over and above our experience of the world, the world we've been living in has a basic ethical importance for us. We wouldn't give it up for just anything.