From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Feb 21 2000 - 20:21:47 MST
"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" wrote:
>
> 1) Subjunctive informed consent.
> 2) Overlay informed consent.
Note that only a real purist would actually use either of these methods.
If, for some reason, I wanted to hang around in a simulation instead of
racing off to Power-land, the method I'd use would be:
3) Hack the emotional bindings.
The basic reason for wanting to obliterate knowledge of the simulation
is that knowing it's not real detracts from the experience. The simple
solution is to change the emotional bindings - during the simulation -
so that knowing it's not real doesn't make a difference. To prevent the
default binding for "It's not real!" from interfering with the memories,
you'd also need to change your cognitive architecture slightly so that
the changed bindings were cached along with the memory.
Both of these are much simpler cases, ethically, than either of the
other methods, and should suffice for 99% of the practical
functionality. Considering that playing in simulations is the only
reason I can think of why you'd want to get into the informed-consent
issue in the first place, availability of the hack might be enough to
preserve the ethical fabric of society.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/beyond.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:26:57 MST