| I think the VR world is bothersome because you (and me, and many others) have some part of our value system or moral calculus that isn't a function of people's subjective experience but is to do with the arrangement of stuff in the highly contentious 'base reality'. Wireheading gives a similar icky feeling; if we got everyone in the world some brain implants that made sure they were perfectly happy with their situation, no matter the situation, would the situation as a whole be morally better, worse, or equal to how it is now? I would say worse, because somewhere in my morality look-up table it says that the happiness of a person who is sitting in a concrete cell with their brain wired up to induce happiness is less good than the happiness of a person listening to the symphony or whatever, even if their subjective reports would both be full of joy. For me this holds true even if the hypothetical wirehead-world is setup in some way to make sure that people keep breeding or live forever in wirehead bliss or what have you; the situation's value is not just some sum of expected subjective 'utility scores' or something similar (apart from the "Repugnant Conclusion" which is another problem here). This is probably a patronising and paternalistic kind of morality for me to have, but I'm OK with that (and secretly suspect a bit that people who claim to have a morality totally devoid of this sort of thing are either deluding themselves or lying). I do like the idea of 50% scale world (although whether 50% scale world would actually work the same I don't know). Introspecting, that seems OK because it's still made of normal matter, which I must conclude has different moral value to simulated matter. |