Yeah the character Barkley had a problem with using the Holodeck as a substitute for real social relations.
I have played it, and GTA is cartoonish - nothing as ‘real-life’ as a holodeck. Holodeck scenarios that I have seen on STTNG are every bit as real looking as reality in both look and feel (things are tangible), so I think there would be a huge difference in a holodeck simulation. I could play out a one-on-one hand to hand combat or a jungle warfare assault scenario on the holodeck, and I’m sure my pulse would be through the roof (Dr. Crusher stand by).
But choosing to enact a scenario where you’ve chained someone to a steel chair and then start chiseling them apart while they screamed for their lives, and then dressing yourself in their entrails and dancing around to “Funny Valentine” is quite different, not from a moral perspective but from a sanity perspective.
You can see difference, right?
So you’re saying you could get PTSD from using a holodecK?
Me? I don’t believe I said that. But, come to think of it, some people probably could. Why not?
I’m pretty sure this isn’t the direction the OP wanted to go with this, but IMHO, if a computer can simulate human behavior, emotion, and response as well as the holodeck can, then there’s a question of whether the ‘people’ in the holodeck are sentient to some degree, in which case the rules of right and moral behavior might be appropriate.
Well assuming that the holodeck cannot create sentient beings (I seem to recall the holodeck creating a sentient Dr. Moriarty once), then its not really much different than some of the simulated violence you see in porn these days, is it?
I don’t consider them immoral because, as others have said, there is no victim. It’s no more immoral than a dream.
But if you’re a Christian who believes that there are immoral thoughts, then you’d probably think it is. IANAC, so that doesn’t apply to me.
Heck, even porn aside - murders and rapes are routinely depicted with varying degrees of realism in mainstream films and books, with the corresponding lamentations about their effect on society and calls for censorship and whatnot. That battle’s lost, and the holodeck battle will be the same.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth, I just meant your post led to that sort of conclusion. It’s an interesting idea.
Not really. The computer might have to be sentient, but the simulation of sentient behaviour applies just as much for a character in a book or a video game as for a hologram.
Professor! Professor! It’s Doctor Watson and Professor Moriarty!
(Sorry, it’s just a pet peeve of mine as a fan of the literature. At least you didn’t spell “Moriarty” with more than one “I”.)
Yeah but if the computer were to create a sentient mind as an emergent feature when creating a holodeck character, then that mind is associated by the computer with a visual holodeck element.
It doesn’t matter where this mind is physically located – if you harm the holodeck image you may, indirectly, be harming a sentient being.
This is much more complicated than that, and perhaps due it’s own thread. Even if the sentient machine undergoes the immoral treatment at question, it is presumably still a machine, capable of removing all traces of the experience, and able to restore itself past the point of ‘death’. That which is immoral for a human being is not necessarily immoral for another type of sentient machine.
I’m not sure it’s as simple as that. There are early signs that it may be feasible to erase individual episodes from human memory. If such technology becomes commonplace, would that make it OK to torture someone, as long as you erase the memory afterward?
But yeah, separate thread…
This was my take on it, no matter what horrific thing you do to a holodeck charachter, it can be regenerated as a fresh copy knowing nothing of its past lovers, rapists, murderers. The really messy point becomes, child porn. Since charachters can be drawn from scratch without needing to have any original child source material, no matter what happens there is no trauma or memory of the event. Its eight kinds of icky but would child holo-porn be legal?
And I disagree with the premise that something can only be immoral if it directly harms other people.
First, I believe that if a thing I do affects myself, for good or ill—if it makes me better or worse in some way—that makes it a morally significant action.
Second, I believe that part of the reason for this is that whether I become better or worse does, in turn, affect other people. Recreationally killing, raping, or torturing imaginary people is a morally bad thing to do if it turns me into the kind of person who will be more likely to kill, rape, or torture (or even just be mean to or uncaring towards) real people in the future.
When Dr. Jekyll concocts and drinks the stuff that turns him into Mr. Hyde, is this in itself a bad act, or is it only the crimes that he commits as Hyde that are immoral?
The sentient Moriarty was a one time thing. They told the computer to create one that could defeat Data, and it turned out that giving it that much intellect forced it to be sentient.
What about the doctor on Voyager?
I wouldn’t use the word immoral to describe actions committed on the holodeck, though I suspect that using it as a venue to live out fantasies of rape & murder would be very bad for the human using them and make it more likely that she or he might ultimately commit such an act: particularly rape.
If it makes you less likely to do such things for real, then so far as I’m concerned it’s a good.