If I put some em in a context that makes him happy and that somehow “counts”, what if I take the one em whose happiness is maximal (by size / cost / whatever measure), then duplicate the very same em, in the very same context, ad infinitum, and have 1 gazillion copies of him, e.g. being repeatedly jerked off by $starlet ? Does each new copy count as much as the original? Why? Why not? What if the program was run on a tandem computer for redundancy, with two processors in lock step doing the same computation? Is it redundant in that case, or does it count double? What if I build a virtual machine in which this entire simulation happens in one instruction? Since the simulation has no I/O, what if my optimized implementation does away with it?
You’re still deep into the fairy dust theory of utility. More nano-paperclips, please!
If I put some em in a context that makes him happy and that somehow “counts”, what if I take the one em whose happiness is maximal (by size / cost / whatever measure), then duplicate the very same em, in the very same context, ad infinitum, and have 1 gazillion copies of him, e.g. being repeatedly jerked off by $starlet ? Does each new copy count as much as the original? Why? Why not? What if the program was run on a tandem computer for redundancy, with two processors in lock step doing the same computation? Is it redundant in that case, or does it count double? What if I build a virtual machine in which this entire simulation happens in one instruction? Since the simulation has no I/O, what if my optimized implementation does away with it?
You’re still deep into the fairy dust theory of utility. More nano-paperclips, please!