What if I make each time period in the ”...” one nanosecond shorter than the previous.
You must believe that there is some length of time, t>most of a day, such that everyone in the world being tortured for t-1 nanosecond is better than one person being tortured for t.
Suppose there was a strong clustering effect in human psychology, such that less than a week of torture left peoples minds in one state, and more than a week left them broken. I would still expect the possibility of some intermediate cases on the borderlines. Things as messy as human psychology, I would expect there to not be a perfectly sharp black and white cutoff. If we zoom in enough, we find that the space of possible quantum wavefunctions is continuous.
There is a sense in which specs and torture feel incomparable, but I don’t think this is your sense of incomparability, to me it feels like moral uncertainty about which huge number of specs to pick. I would also say that “Don’t torture anyone” and “don’t commit attrocities based on convoluted arguments” a good ethical injunction. If you think that your own reasoning processes are not very reliable, and you think philosophical thought experiments rarely happen in real life, then implementing the general rule “If I think I should torture someone, go to nearest psych ward” is a good idea. However I would want a perfectly rational AI which never made mistakes to choose torture.
we find the need for a weird cut off point, like a broken arm
For the cut-off point on a broken arm, I recommend the elbow [not a doctor].
Suppose there was a strong clustering effect in human psychology, such that less than a week of torture left peoples minds in one state, and more than a week left them broken. I would still expect the possibility of some intermediate cases on the borderlines. Things as messy as human psychology, I would expect there to not be a perfectly sharp black and white cutoff. If we zoom in enough, we find that the space of possible quantum wavefunctions is continuous.
I agree! You’ve made my point for me: it is precisely this messiness which grants us continuity on average. Some people will take longer than others to have qualitatively incomparably damaging effects from torture, and as such the expected impact of any significant torture will have a component on the severity level of 50 years torture. Hence, comparable (on expectation).
What if I make each time period in the ”...” one nanosecond shorter than the previous.
You must believe that there is some length of time, t>most of a day, such that everyone in the world being tortured for t-1 nanosecond is better than one person being tortured for t.
Suppose there was a strong clustering effect in human psychology, such that less than a week of torture left peoples minds in one state, and more than a week left them broken. I would still expect the possibility of some intermediate cases on the borderlines. Things as messy as human psychology, I would expect there to not be a perfectly sharp black and white cutoff. If we zoom in enough, we find that the space of possible quantum wavefunctions is continuous.
There is a sense in which specs and torture feel incomparable, but I don’t think this is your sense of incomparability, to me it feels like moral uncertainty about which huge number of specs to pick. I would also say that “Don’t torture anyone” and “don’t commit attrocities based on convoluted arguments” a good ethical injunction. If you think that your own reasoning processes are not very reliable, and you think philosophical thought experiments rarely happen in real life, then implementing the general rule “If I think I should torture someone, go to nearest psych ward” is a good idea. However I would want a perfectly rational AI which never made mistakes to choose torture.
For the cut-off point on a broken arm, I recommend the elbow [not a doctor].
I agree! You’ve made my point for me: it is precisely this messiness which grants us continuity on average. Some people will take longer than others to have qualitatively incomparably damaging effects from torture, and as such the expected impact of any significant torture will have a component on the severity level of 50 years torture. Hence, comparable (on expectation).