This suggests to me that whatever I’m doing to make my moral judgments that torture is bad, it’s not just summing the number of perception-moments… there are an equal number of perception-moments in those two cases, after all. (Specifically, none at all.)
True — we need a term for moments of discomfort caused by contemplation, not just ones caused by perception.
It seems to me, though, that your brain can only perceive a finite number of gradations of unpleasant contemplation, too. The memory of being tortured for five minutes, the memory of being tortured for a year, and the memory of having gotten a dust speck in your eye could occupy points on this scale of unpleasantness.
True — we need a term for moments of discomfort caused by contemplation, not just ones caused by perception.
It seems to me, though, that your brain can only perceive a finite number of gradations of unpleasant contemplation, too. The memory of being tortured for five minutes, the memory of being tortured for a year, and the memory of having gotten a dust speck in your eye could occupy points on this scale of unpleasantness.