Your writing feels comically-disturbingly wrong to me, I think the most likely cause is that your model of “suffering” is very different from mine. It’s possible that you “went off to infinity” in some direction that I can’t follow, and over there the landscape really does look like that, but from where I am it just looks like you have very little experience with serious suffering and ignore a whole lot of what looks to me to be essential complexity.
When you say that all types of suffering can be eliminated / reversed, this feels wrong because people change in response to trauma and other extreme suffering, it (and the resulting growth) tends to become a core part of their personality. There is no easy way back from there, in a way this is also non-reversible. Removing a core part of their personality would effectively destroy them, replacing them with a past version of themselves feels equivalent to killing them, except it also devalues their struggle and their very existence.
Getting the decision on whether (and how far) to reset from anything other than their current self takes away their agency. The different versions along time are (potentially very) different persons, singling out any one of them and valuing it higher than the others is bound to be problematic. I doubt that you could find a consistent valuation within the strands of the person over time, and imposing some external choice just creates a hell (tho it may not be apparent from inside.) I don’t think that this is something that you can “magic away” by sufficiently advanced AI / singularity. (And if you think that arbitrary editing of the person has already taken away their agency…? Well then you still have the same problem of identifying the point where they cease to be mostly self-determined, where they cease to be “them”, and the “torture meta-game” will have shifted to make that maximally hard.)
So the best that you could achieve is probably something like having multiple independent versions of a person exist in parallel, but at that point you’re not erasing/undoing the suffering anymore, and some versions may well want to cease to exist – for them, this will have been a fate worse than death. (At this point the “best” strategy for the 100 billion year torture meta-game is probably to allow just enough space for recovery and growth that there’s a high chance that the person wants to continue existing, not sure that’s better…)
By this time we’re dealing with multiple versions of possibly arbitrarily rewritten copies of a person… and at this point, we’re basically in situations that other commenters described. It would be no harder to resurrect from traces of physical remains… (If you can recover the original process after billions of years of deliberate, directed reshaping, then surely recovering it after a mere thousands of years subject to mostly random bio/physical processes should be trivial in comparison, right?) …or outright create new persons from scratch… (Who could tell the difference, hm? And if anyone could, would they feel safe enough to point it out?) …than to deal with all this “undoing of suffering”. Now look again at your question:
If you press the button, you save 1 life. But 7 billion humans will suffer from the worst possible torture for 100 billion years. […]
Your writing feels comically-disturbingly wrong to me, I think the most likely cause is that your model of “suffering” is very different from mine. It’s possible that you “went off to infinity” in some direction that I can’t follow, and over there the landscape really does look like that, but from where I am it just looks like you have very little experience with serious suffering and ignore a whole lot of what looks to me to be essential complexity.
When you say that all types of suffering can be eliminated / reversed, this feels wrong because people change in response to trauma and other extreme suffering, it (and the resulting growth) tends to become a core part of their personality. There is no easy way back from there, in a way this is also non-reversible. Removing a core part of their personality would effectively destroy them, replacing them with a past version of themselves feels equivalent to killing them, except it also devalues their struggle and their very existence.
Getting the decision on whether (and how far) to reset from anything other than their current self takes away their agency. The different versions along time are (potentially very) different persons, singling out any one of them and valuing it higher than the others is bound to be problematic. I doubt that you could find a consistent valuation within the strands of the person over time, and imposing some external choice just creates a hell (tho it may not be apparent from inside.) I don’t think that this is something that you can “magic away” by sufficiently advanced AI / singularity. (And if you think that arbitrary editing of the person has already taken away their agency…? Well then you still have the same problem of identifying the point where they cease to be mostly self-determined, where they cease to be “them”, and the “torture meta-game” will have shifted to make that maximally hard.)
So the best that you could achieve is probably something like having multiple independent versions of a person exist in parallel, but at that point you’re not erasing/undoing the suffering anymore, and some versions may well want to cease to exist – for them, this will have been a fate worse than death. (At this point the “best” strategy for the 100 billion year torture meta-game is probably to allow just enough space for recovery and growth that there’s a high chance that the person wants to continue existing, not sure that’s better…)
By this time we’re dealing with multiple versions of possibly arbitrarily rewritten copies of a person… and at this point, we’re basically in situations that other commenters described. It would be no harder to resurrect from traces of physical remains… (If you can recover the original process after billions of years of deliberate, directed reshaping, then surely recovering it after a mere thousands of years subject to mostly random bio/physical processes should be trivial in comparison, right?) …or outright create new persons from scratch… (Who could tell the difference, hm? And if anyone could, would they feel safe enough to point it out?) …than to deal with all this “undoing of suffering”. Now look again at your question:
I don’t think the answer is yes.