Not sure what you are asking.
Is it not clear that in order to calculate the probability of any proposition, you need an actual definition of the proposition at hand?
My point was that the human notion of torture is apriori a tiny speck in the ocean of possible Turing machines. We don't know nearly enough at this point to worry about accidental or intentional sim torture, so we shouldn't, until at least a ballpark estimate with a few sigma confidence interval can be computed.
I think we agree that the only currently feasible arguments for any given value of P(a mind in such and such a mindspace is being tortured) are those based on heuristics.
However, you say these minds constitute "apriori a tiny speck", and I do not endorse such a statement (given any reasonable definition of torture), unless you have some unstated, reasonable, heuristic reason for believing so. Ironically, "failure of imagination" is frequently a counterargument to people arguing that a certain reference class is a priori very small.
Is it not clear that in order to calculate the probability of any proposition, you need an actual definition of the proposition at hand?
My only reason is of the Pascal's wager-type: you pick one possibility (tortured sims) out of unimaginably many, without providing any estimate of its abundance in the sea of all possibilities, why privilege it?
Today's post, The Design Space of Minds-In-General was originally published on 25 June 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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