Having written the above, I went away and came back with a clearer way to express it: For suffering-related (or positive experience related) calculations, one person = one stream of conscious experience, two people = two streams of conscious experience. My brain can only do one stream of conscious experience at a time, so I’m not worried that by imagining characters, I’ve created a bunch of people. But I would worry that something with different hardware than me could.
Having written the above, I went away and came back with a clearer way to express it: For suffering-related (or positive experience related) calculations, one person = one stream of conscious experience, two people = two streams of conscious experience. My brain can only do one stream of conscious experience at a time, so I’m not worried that by imagining characters, I’ve created a bunch of people. But I would worry that something with different hardware than me could.