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private_messaging comments on Torture vs. Dust Specks - Less Wrong
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It's not a continuum fallacy because I would accept "There is some pair (N,T) such that (N people tortured for T seconds) is worse than (10^100 N people tortured for T-1 seconds), but I don't know the exact values of N and T" as an answer. If, on the other hand, the comparison goes the other way for any values of N and T, then you have to accept the transitive closure of those comparisons as well.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. I don't believe in linearity of suffering: that would be the claim that 2 people tortured for 1 day is the same as 1 person tortured for 2 days, and that's ridiculous. I believe in comparability of suffering, which is the claim that for some value of N, N people tortured for 1 day is worse than 1 person tortured for 2 days.
Regarding anaesthetics: I would prefer a memory inhibitor for a painful surgery to the absence of one, but I would still strongly prefer to feel less pain during the surgery even if I know I will not remember it one way or the other. Is this preference unusual?
For one thing N=1 T=1 trivially satisfies your condition...
I mean, suppose that you got yourself a function that takes in a description of what's going on in a region of spacetime, and it spits out a real number of how bad it is.
Now, that function can do all sorts of perfectly reasonable things that could make it asymptotic for large numbers of people, for example it could be counting distinct subjective experiences in there (otherwise a mind upload on very multiple redundant hardware is an utility monster, despite having an identical subjective experience to same upload running one time. That's much sillier than the usual utility monster, which feels much stronger feelings). This would impose a finite limit (for brains of finite complexity).
One thing that function can't do, is to have a general property that f(a union b)=f(a)+f(b) , because then we just subdivide our space into individual atoms none of which are feeling anything.
Obviously I only meant to consider values of T and N that actually occur in the argument we were both talking about.
Well I'm not sure what's the point then. What you're trying to induct from it.