You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

DanielLC comments on an ethical puzzle about brain emulation - Less Wrong Discussion

14 Post author: asr 13 December 2013 09:53PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (55)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: DanielLC 14 December 2013 01:09:46AM 2 points [-]

My instinct is that each mental state only happens once. If you redo the calculations, he doesn't experience it twice. It's similar to the idea that doubling the size of each neuron doesn't seem like it would change anything.

On the other hand, the Born rule suggests that the universes involved having twice the value makes them four times as likely to be experienced. That suggests that running a one-second calculation ten times would be ten times worse than just running a ten-second calculation.

In any case, I would definitely say that C isn't as bad as A. Moving written values around is not the same as running calculations.