It may be worthwhile thinking about the flipside of this question. Is it good for someone to remember a pleasure that never happened?
Suppose some uploaded human sets themselves the goal of achieving a perfect score at some game. Is an FAI doing her a favor by adjusting her memory to indicate that the goal has already been achieved?
But I think it is even more worthwhile to puzzle over whether your second question even makes sense.
Is it bad to have experienced pain in the past, if you don’t remember it?
You are asking for a moral judgment of past events. But can we (should we?) do this? The whole point of making moral judgments regarding future events is to help to guide present or future decision making. Can there be any point to making judgments regarding past events? How does this pay the rent?
If you alter your model of the world, you should normally spend some resources sanity checking it—by feeding it recorded data from your memory stores—to see if it makes correct predictions for the data you have on record.
For most non-trivial updates, that process will naturally involve predicting the actions of your past self—and the actions of others—and so will involve issues associated with morality and decision making.
It may be worthwhile thinking about the flipside of this question. Is it good for someone to remember a pleasure that never happened?
Suppose some uploaded human sets themselves the goal of achieving a perfect score at some game. Is an FAI doing her a favor by adjusting her memory to indicate that the goal has already been achieved?
But I think it is even more worthwhile to puzzle over whether your second question even makes sense.
You are asking for a moral judgment of past events. But can we (should we?) do this? The whole point of making moral judgments regarding future events is to help to guide present or future decision making. Can there be any point to making judgments regarding past events? How does this pay the rent?
If you alter your model of the world, you should normally spend some resources sanity checking it—by feeding it recorded data from your memory stores—to see if it makes correct predictions for the data you have on record.
For most non-trivial updates, that process will naturally involve predicting the actions of your past self—and the actions of others—and so will involve issues associated with morality and decision making.