Pig brains partially revived four hours after death

Yes. If something can experience pain, I think it's immoral to cause pain when it's unnecessary. If something is sentient, I think it's immoral to stop sentience without reason.

> Do you think that simply carrying out a computation can be immoral? I think no, and the difference between experimenting on a real person and a person in your simulation is that in the second case nothing would exist if you didn't spend your resources to run the simulation, (or in the original context spend resources to revive a discarded brain).

Yes. If you run a simulation that works on sentient AI's, then IMO mistreating them is immoral. I view them as life, and creating life comes with responsibilities.

Importantly, I think this view is important otherwise morality breaks down entirely. There's a chance we're all in a simulation right now. Does that mean nothing we do to each other can be immoral? What if we could prove we were in a simulation? That that free people form moral constraints?

> Interesting, i have never thought of this as a benefit, to me the hell seemed better because there you do not die, and logically have a chance to get out, because of love and forgiveness preached by some parts of the bible.

I'm not a bible scholar, but to my understanding, you go to hell for "eternity". Given the mystical nature of the whole supposition, I don't think it's useful to believe it existence is correct but the unescapability is not.

And how does that work with children? It definitely follows some of the older thinking on the subject, but not any "modern" thinking on it. If I and my wife decide we don't want kids any more, are we free to end our children? I could claim that they can't exist indepdently of me (at least up to a certain age). It's also possible that an AI in a simulation might be able to provide enough benefit to someone to receive income, and enough to pay for its own resources. I think "could exist independent of me" is fairly ambiguous in this context.

Ultimately, this is all philosophical, and I don't think there's really a right or wrong answer, just people - walking talking examples of emergent phenomena - trying to find meaning. I actually don't think it's possible for a person for be completely consistent in behavior because of this, and at best we can hope to at least be consistent in how we perceive our actions. Thus, it doesn't surprise me that I find some of your views inconsistent, and that you likely find the same of me. We ultimately have different perceptions of what's being explained, and thus what seems entirely logical and consistent to one of us seems askew to the other. Exploring those views does have merit though, as it allows for a more comprehensive view of the subject.

I'm not going to disagree with that. I argued the same earlier in this discussion in a more general sense.

> But ai is not unique, you can have an ai interacting with real world, providing for itself, and use an exact copy of that ai in an experiment (even the ai could experiment on a copy of itself!).

Which is an argument for duplicates, but 1) as a copy gets different inputs and diverges, it is unique, in the same way the you of this second is different slightly than the you before you started reading this sentence (and throw in Ship of Theseus for flavor). 2) even if the copies aren't viewed as diffierent, what about the last copy? If you've grown an AI, deleting the last copy is eliminating something something unique, if there was any possible input that cannot be replicated.

> I think if a society decides to not allow any experiments on ai/brains in a jar, it would have hard time to enforce this, and if it succeeds enforcing the ban it will be out-competed by a neighbor that allows such experiments.

The same could be said of any human experimentation that is banned. And that might be right. It's only been a relatively short time it's been in place in any enforceable way, in historical context.