This is super insightful, thank you. Hans Moravec goes over similar territory here: >If simulation simply opens windows into Platonic realities, and robots an

This is super insightful, thank you. Hans Moravec goes over similar territory here: >If simulation simply opens windows into Platonic realities, and robots and humans, no less than books, movies, or computer models, are only images of those essences, then it should be no worse to mistreat a human, an animal or a feeling robot than to choose a cruel action in a video game or an interactive book: in all cases you are simply viewing preexisting realities. But choices do have consequences for the person making them because of the mysterious contrivance of physical law and conscious interpretation that produces single threads of consciousness with unseen futures and unalterable pasts. By our choices, we each thread our own separate way through the maze of possible worlds, bypassing equally real alternatives with equally real versions of ourselves and others, selecting the world we must then live in. So is there no difference between being cruel to characters in interactive books or video games and people one meets in the street? Books or games act on a reader's future only via the mind, and actions within them are mostly reversed if the experience is forgotten. Physical actions, by contrast, have greater significance because their consequences spread irreversibly. If past physical events could be easily altered, as in some time-travel stories, if one could go back to prevent evil or unfortunate deeds, real life would acquire the moral significance of a video game. A more disturbing implication is that any sealed-off activity, whose goings on can be forgotten, may be in the video game category. Creators of hyperrealistic simulations---or even secure physical enclosures---containing individuals writhing in pain are not necessarily more wicked than authors of fiction with distressed characters, or myself, composing this sentence vaguely alluding to them. The suffering preexists in the underlying Platonic worlds; authors merely look on. The significance of running such simulations is limited to their effect on viewers, possibly warped by the experience, and by the possibility of ``escapees''---tortured minds that could, in principle, leak out to haunt the world in data networks or physical bodies. Potential plagues of angry demons surely count as a moral consequence. In this light, mistreating people, intelligent robots, or individuals in high-resolution simulations has greater moral significance than doing the same at low resolution or in works of fiction not because the suffering individuals are more real---they are not---but because the probability of undesirable consequences in our own future is greater. https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1998/SimConEx.98.html https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles...