Also, in many cases other people have plans and desires for us: they prefer us to be alive and well, to enjoy pleasure and avoid pain, and so on.
But why do other people prefer for you to avoid pain, if pain is not a moral disvalue? And what exactly do they mean by “pain” (which is what the post asked in the first place)?
I liked this comment on Alicorn’s post: “(pain) makes you want to pull away; it’s a flinch, abstracted”. What seems to matter about pain, when I think about scenarios such as the one you proposed, is its permanent aversive effect, something not present in simulated pain.
Trying to frame this in terms of anticipated experiences, the question I would want to ask about the posited ECP is, “if I meet this ECP again will they hold it against me that I failed to press the button, because of negative reinforcement in our first encounter”. The way you’ve framed the thought experiment suggests that they won’t have a memory of the encounter, in fact that I’m not even likely to think of them as an entity I might “meet”.
But why do other people prefer for you to avoid pain, if pain is not a moral disvalue? And what exactly do they mean by “pain” (which is what the post asked in the first place)?
I liked this comment on Alicorn’s post: “(pain) makes you want to pull away; it’s a flinch, abstracted”. What seems to matter about pain, when I think about scenarios such as the one you proposed, is its permanent aversive effect, something not present in simulated pain.
Trying to frame this in terms of anticipated experiences, the question I would want to ask about the posited ECP is, “if I meet this ECP again will they hold it against me that I failed to press the button, because of negative reinforcement in our first encounter”. The way you’ve framed the thought experiment suggests that they won’t have a memory of the encounter, in fact that I’m not even likely to think of them as an entity I might “meet”.