A varient on 1: fifty one years after getting the dust speck, the victims will be as they would have been without it. It gets flat-out forgotten. Probably never even makes it into long-term memory. The physical damage is completely repaired. But the torture victim will likely be mentally broken. If you think of consequences when it’s over, specs are preferable. So there is a specific qualitative difference between specs and torture, which supports our intuition to round small things to zero.
Okay, let’s account for that and, uhm, double the amount of dust specks. Or just rule out indirect effects by having an untortured “back-up” upload of the victim that you use to repair whatever damage happened, including traumatic memories. The whole point of thought experiments like this is to get you thinking about just the variables that are mentioned to figure out what principles you consider to be relevant. If we find further arguments to support a conclusion, we are not playing properly.
In that case, it depends on if the torture victim would live until the singularity/cryonics, or if they would die of old age and then that trauma would be gone as well.
A varient on 1: fifty one years after getting the dust speck, the victims will be as they would have been without it. It gets flat-out forgotten. Probably never even makes it into long-term memory. The physical damage is completely repaired. But the torture victim will likely be mentally broken. If you think of consequences when it’s over, specs are preferable. So there is a specific qualitative difference between specs and torture, which supports our intuition to round small things to zero.
Okay, let’s account for that and, uhm, double the amount of dust specks. Or just rule out indirect effects by having an untortured “back-up” upload of the victim that you use to repair whatever damage happened, including traumatic memories. The whole point of thought experiments like this is to get you thinking about just the variables that are mentioned to figure out what principles you consider to be relevant. If we find further arguments to support a conclusion, we are not playing properly.
In that case, it depends on if the torture victim would live until the singularity/cryonics, or if they would die of old age and then that trauma would be gone as well.