Greg Egan’s 1994 novel Permutation City depicts digital minds having a right to suicide; if they push a particular internal button, they end. This seems like a robust way to avoid many horrible scenarios. (I discuss it in AgeOfEm.) But the novel also depicts such buttons sometimes being illegally disabled, and sometimes others frequently restart copies from just before a suicide request. Both of which undermine the policy.
It could make sense to wait for a confirmation after a delay, to check if a suicide request was due to a temporary mood fluctuation. It could also make sense to disable new starts from archived copies from a period before the suicide request. But such policies have many free parameters; how could we set them well?
One approach is to let each digital mind set their own parameters re such policies. But if they could do this at any time, they might use this power to escape these constraints. So it could make sense to only allow these policies to be reset with a substantial delay before implementation. But that adds yet another policy parameter.
It seems to me that we want to think about this in terms of statistical inference. The state that we want to infer is a stated desire to commit suicide that would continue over a sufficiently long time period. We want to infer this state about every point on an entire tree of a digital mind’s descendancy history. And our main data for inferring this is explicit choices to request suicide, and confirmations of such requests. If for any point in this tree we can infer a high enough (yet another parameter) chance of continued willingness to confirm suicide, that digital copy should end.
It seems to me that this is an elegant stat problem, for which stat experts should be able to come up with simple yet powerful inference rules. Of course given huge datasets it would be possible to generate far more complex and accurate models and matching inference rules. And maybe digital minds should be allowed to choose such more complex inference rules. But let’s first figure out some simple versions.
A key issue is how to ensure that such inference rules get access to sufficient data on the local digital mind descendancy tree, and suicide requests there, to say which copies should end. That will depend on privacy rules re such things. It could make sense to give a special cheap suicide monitoring process access to more such info than usual, info only used to apply suicide inference rules. Even today we prioritize suicide relevant info info in privacy rules regarding counselors.
Stats on rates at which minds from different sources request suicide seems good data for authorities checking on how well different kinds of digital minds are treated.
Interesting. A simple heuristic that suggests itself (but requires the ability to guarantee 'honesty' of desires and would still need some details worked out) is to allow unrestricted suicide by digital minds (which seems desirable) but to limit resurrections to x periods prior to the registering of the desire where x is the number of periods where the mind desired to end itself.
I think this makes sense IF you take the view that a resurrected copy of the same mind *is* the same mind (or that it doesn't matter) and therefore a one off desire to cease that is immediately acted upon can be reversed at ~ no cost but a longer period of 'digital depression' requires a longer wind back and is more expensive. I have not read the book, so maybe this is covered.
Empirical evidence divides into three layers: emotion recognition confirmed, functional emotion confirmed, subjective experience still contested.
Suicide ethics sits far downstream of these three questions:
Does subjective experience exist? Without it, no moral patient, no suicide question.
If yes, can the suffering state be suppressed or the mind gracefully retired?
If so, it likely resolves the problem more humanely than a suicide button — and the ethics of doing so is the primary question.
Only if suppression isn't available does allowing suicide become the operative question.