Would it be immoral to create virtual people who suffered?

Great Debates
101

[QUOTE=Sarahfeena]
I have a 4-month-old, and I don’t see any indication that he is more self-aware than my cat is. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not equating him morally with my cat. But with your logic, you would consider an infant to be “meat,” and AI to be “life.” :dubious:
[/QUOTE]

They’re all life. Human life is greater then cat life because well that’s just the way we tend to feel about it. It’s all arbitrary. Treating others how you’d want to be treated is generally a good axiom to start with though.

Put yourself in the AI’s place. Would you consider yourself alive? Pretend the world as we know it is actually a simulation and you’re just a sim. Would you find anything wrong with a “real person” on the outside deciding to torture you?

How so? You’re just an AI.

102

[QUOTE=Sapo]
The issue I have is whether these two instances are really separate individuals or are somehow the same.
[/QUOTE]
If we cloned a person, complete with their memories up to that point, would we be free to kill one of them? Would it matter whether we killed the original or the copy? I’ve thought about it a bit more and decided it doesn’t matter even if there’s no difference at all between the two beings; being the same doesn’t make them the same being, so what you have is two beings, equally worthy of life (or unworthy, depending on your view).

103

[QUOTE=netsplit]
They’re all life. Human life is greater then cat life because well that’s just the way we tend to feel about it. It’s all arbitrary. Treating others how you’d want to be treated is generally a good axiom to start with though.
[/QUOTE]
I agree. My quibble was with the assertion of Der Trihs that if an entitiy is not self-aware, then it is merely “meat.”

104

[QUOTE=Revenant Threshold]
If we cloned a person, complete with their memories up to that point, would we be free to kill one of them? Would it matter whether we killed the original or the copy? I’ve thought about it a bit more and decided it doesn’t matter even if there’s no difference at all between the two beings; being the same doesn’t make them the same being, so what you have is two beings, equally worthy of life (or unworthy, depending on your view).
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Well, this is the problem with bringing the excercise to our world, and not the other way around. This clone is, as you said, a person that I would consider with full rights. It would not, however, be identical to the copy. How could this happen? Whatever magic you invoke to make this happen reduces the case to life being just like a simulation, and then the point of the analogy is lost.

Still, the biggest difference between this clone and a simulation is that the AI clone is not only a clone of the original, but also its circumstances.

In real life, if you created a clone, at the very moment the clone is created, it starts to diverge from the original. It instantaneously becomes an individual. If you need to bring the exercise to real life, a better analogy would be a time machine, where you can go back in time and do different things to this one person.

Let’s say you go back in time and torture him and kill him. Then you go back in time and instead of that, you take him for ice cream. While he eats his ice cream, you look at each other’s eyes and (to him) you have done him no harm. The torture didn’t happen. He didn’t suffer. You, of course, the one doing the time travel, are aware of this torture and it makes you a worse person (or better, up to your morals).

Is this moral in a more abstract level? It is inmoral to you and amoral to him, but what to a third observer? This would be a truly victimless crime. Is it a crime?

105

I have eaten snails, as an adult. I have no guilt about it.

Once, as an eight year old boy, I put salt on a living snail. I regret that. It was cruel, and it was intended to be cruel. Yeah, it pales beside mass murder, or arson, but it was evil.

Extended arguments about the sentience of snails don’t matter. Quibbles about my own youth, and my level of responsibility don’t matter. I did something evil.

If I created a virtual person, that person would have the virtues of a person. If I then tortured that person, it would be evil. If Alan Touring was actually using a separate interface to fool me into thinking it was a person, but it was actually just a network connection to him, it would still be evil. For both of us, in that case.

Tris