Kindly comments on Torture vs. Dust Specks - Less Wrong

39 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 30 October 2007 02:50AM

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Comment author: private_messaging 26 March 2015 11:01:46PM *  0 points [-]

don't know the exact values of N and T

For one thing N=1 T=1 trivially satisfies your condition...

I'm not sure what you mean by this.

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.

Comment author: Kindly 27 March 2015 12:17:18AM 0 points [-]

For one thing N=1 T=1 trivially satisfies your condition...

Obviously I only meant to consider values of T and N that actually occur in the argument we were both talking about.

Comment author: private_messaging 27 March 2015 12:33:53PM 0 points [-]

Well I'm not sure what's the point then. What you're trying to induct from it.