The hypervisor creates a bijection from real numbers to virtual machines. So, at the abstraction level of the hypervisor’s interface, the number of virtual machines is continuum. Nobody says that you have to think about this system only at this layer of abstraction. But at least at this layer of abstraction there are uncountably many conscious minds. So, how are you going to apply utilitarianism in this case? The only way to make utilitarianism still work in this case, is to somehow claim that those minds don’t count. And if you want to say that digital minds in general count, but in this particular case they don’t count infinitely—then you have to come up with some very complex ad-hoc logic. So I conclude that utilitarianism and moral patienthood of digital minds don’t mix well together. So, I discard the combination “utilitarianism+digital_morality_patients”. There are many remaining moral philosophies not affected by my thought experiment. Like, utilitarianism+OrchOR is unaffected, virtue ethics is unaffected, moral egoism is unaffected.
A computable hypervisor can’t run an uncountable number of different VMs. You seem to be talking about a countable number of segments of the real line, with identical VMs in each segment. That gives you a countable number of different. VMs, but it’s not really a bijection, because it’s not general. And it’s only an abstraction that a segment consists of uncountable identical VMs, not just one with a rational measure
The hypervisor creates a bijection from real numbers to virtual machines. So, at the abstraction level of the hypervisor’s interface, the number of virtual machines is continuum. Nobody says that you have to think about this system only at this layer of abstraction. But at least at this layer of abstraction there are uncountably many conscious minds. So, how are you going to apply utilitarianism in this case? The only way to make utilitarianism still work in this case, is to somehow claim that those minds don’t count. And if you want to say that digital minds in general count, but in this particular case they don’t count infinitely—then you have to come up with some very complex ad-hoc logic. So I conclude that utilitarianism and moral patienthood of digital minds don’t mix well together. So, I discard the combination “utilitarianism+digital_morality_patients”. There are many remaining moral philosophies not affected by my thought experiment. Like, utilitarianism+OrchOR is unaffected, virtue ethics is unaffected, moral egoism is unaffected.
A computable hypervisor can’t run an uncountable number of different VMs. You seem to be talking about a countable number of segments of the real line, with identical VMs in each segment. That gives you a countable number of different. VMs, but it’s not really a bijection, because it’s not general. And it’s only an abstraction that a segment consists of uncountable identical VMs, not just one with a rational measure
You’re correct that this is what happens at one of the abstraction layers. But the choice of that layer is pretty arbitrary. By abstraction layers:
L1: hypervisor interface: uncountably many VMs
L2: hypervisor implementation: countably many VMs
L3: semiconductors: no VMs, only high and low signals
L4: electrons: no high and low signals, only electromagnetic fields
So yes, on L2 the number of VMs is finite. But why morality should count what happens on L2 and not on L1 or L3, L4? This is too arbitrary.