As a variation of your thought experiment, I’ve pondered: How do you morally evaluate a life of a human who lives with some mental suffering during a day, but thrives in vivid and blissful dreams during their sleep time? In a hypothetical adversary case one may even have dreams formed by their desires and the desires be made stronger by the daytime suffering. Intuitively it seems dissociative disorders might arise with a mechanism like this.
depends on the amount of mental suffering. there could be an amount of mental suffering where the awake phases of that moral patient would be ethically unviable.
this doesn’t necessarily prevent their sleeping phases from existing; even if the dreams are formed by desires that would arise from the days of suffering, the AI could simply induce them synthetic desires that are statistically likely to match what they would’ve gotten from suffering, even without going through it. if they also value genuineness strongly enough, however, then their sleeping phase as it is now might be ethically unviable as well, and might have to be dissatisfied.
As a variation of your thought experiment, I’ve pondered: How do you morally evaluate a life of a human who lives with some mental suffering during a day, but thrives in vivid and blissful dreams during their sleep time?
In a hypothetical adversary case one may even have dreams formed by their desires and the desires be made stronger by the daytime suffering. Intuitively it seems dissociative disorders might arise with a mechanism like this.
depends on the amount of mental suffering. there could be an amount of mental suffering where the awake phases of that moral patient would be ethically unviable.
this doesn’t necessarily prevent their sleeping phases from existing; even if the dreams are formed by desires that would arise from the days of suffering, the AI could simply induce them synthetic desires that are statistically likely to match what they would’ve gotten from suffering, even without going through it. if they also value genuineness strongly enough, however, then their sleeping phase as it is now might be ethically unviable as well, and might have to be dissatisfied.