The mathematical object to use for the moral calculations needs not be homologous to real numbers.
My way of seeing it is that the speck of dust barely noticeable will be strictly smaller than torture no matter how many instances of speck of dust happen. That’s just how my ‘moral numbers’ operate. The speck of dust equals A>0, the torture equals B>0, the A*N<B holds for any finite N . . I forbid infinities (the number of distinct beings is finite).
If you think that’s necessarily irrational you have a lot of mathematics to learn. You can start with ordinal numbers.
edit: note, i am ignoring consequences of the specks in the eyes as I think they are not the point of the exercise and only obfuscate everything plus one has to make assumptions like specks ending up in eyes of people whom are driving.
The linked post still assumes that discomfort space is one dimensional, which it needs not be. The decision outcomes do need to behave like comparison does (if a>b and b>c it must follow that a>c) but that’s about it.
Bottom line is, we can’t very well reflect on how we think about this issue, so its hard to come up with some model that works the same as your head, and which you can reflect on, calculate with computer, etc.
By the way, consider a being made of 10^30 parts with 10^30 states each. That’s quite big being, way bigger than human. The number of distinct states of such being is (10^30)^(10^30) = 10^(30*10^30) , which is unimaginably smaller than 3^^^3 . You can pick beings that are to humans as humans are to amoeba, repeated many times, and still be waaay short of 3^^^3.
The guys who chose torture, congrats on also having a demonstrable reasoning failure when reasoning about huge numbers.
edit: embarrassing math glitch of my own. It is difficult to reason about huge numbers and easy to miss something, such as number of ‘people’ exceeding number of possible human mind states by unimaginably far.
The mathematical object to use for the moral calculations needs not be homologous to real numbers.
My way of seeing it is that the speck of dust barely noticeable will be strictly smaller than torture no matter how many instances of speck of dust happen. That’s just how my ‘moral numbers’ operate. The speck of dust equals A>0, the torture equals B>0, the A*N<B holds for any finite N . . I forbid infinities (the number of distinct beings is finite).
If you think that’s necessarily irrational you have a lot of mathematics to learn. You can start with ordinal numbers.
edit: note, i am ignoring consequences of the specks in the eyes as I think they are not the point of the exercise and only obfuscate everything plus one has to make assumptions like specks ending up in eyes of people whom are driving.
If I understand correctly, then I agree with you. But this viewpoint has consequences.
The linked post still assumes that discomfort space is one dimensional, which it needs not be. The decision outcomes do need to behave like comparison does (if a>b and b>c it must follow that a>c) but that’s about it.
Bottom line is, we can’t very well reflect on how we think about this issue, so its hard to come up with some model that works the same as your head, and which you can reflect on, calculate with computer, etc.
By the way, consider a being made of 10^30 parts with 10^30 states each. That’s quite big being, way bigger than human. The number of distinct states of such being is (10^30)^(10^30) = 10^(30*10^30) , which is unimaginably smaller than 3^^^3 . You can pick beings that are to humans as humans are to amoeba, repeated many times, and still be waaay short of 3^^^3. The guys who chose torture, congrats on also having a demonstrable reasoning failure when reasoning about huge numbers.
edit: embarrassing math glitch of my own. It is difficult to reason about huge numbers and easy to miss something, such as number of ‘people’ exceeding number of possible human mind states by unimaginably far.