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Okay, in order to have any productive discussion about this we would have to first establish what features would need to be present for a system to warrant possible moral consideration. If that's the expanded definition of "reward function" we're going off here, what do you feel about animal suffering, and how is torturing a baby chick different from torturing a Sim? What would make this different for you outside of intuition?
If you're not relying on something like substrate-dependence, I have the sense that your argument will end up proving too much, but I'll wait for you to articulate it before jumping to conclusions.
This is why I'm not a utilitarian. The idea that you can quantify suffering and then try to optimize over the sum necessarily leads to absurdities around ideas like the torment nexus.
If we care about AI pain, shouldn't we also care about AI pleasure? And then isn't it our moral obligation to create as many AIs as possible and simulate the pleasure nexus for each of them? Even if there's only a tiny chance AIs can experience pleasure?
I'm not exactly a utilitarian either (classical/hedonistic utilitarianism would support things like endless wireheading for all humans, whereas preference utilitarianism is untenable and is often just used as a way to escape the worst conclusions of classical utilitarianism), but:
These aren't really symmetrical considerations; that costs resources and time that could be devoted to other, far more worthwhile endeavours with a much higher chance of producing significant lasting utility for others, whereas not creating a Torment Nexus cost nothing (the very marginal utility the creator gets from the satisfaction of having created a Torment Nexus is outweighed by the annoyance it would very plausibly cause others). If we had a way to create possible AI pleasure that cost nothing for us then yes, I would say it should be taken.
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Yeah, that would be a good thing to establish before your visceral disgust, because until then you'll get people like the above, and me, saying you can't torture chips and you can't torture matrices.
I didn't say that it was certainly the case that you could do so (in fact I specifically stated it was likely not the case). But if you hold anything less than absolute certainty that such a system cannot harbour qualia you should probably not be creating the Torment Nexus for that system.
In any case I don't see how one is ever supposed to conclusively prove qualia in a way that would satisfy you and your ilk without the possibility of inviting objection, since shit like this almost entirely always boils down to pitting one intuition pump against another. I can posit that there is enough epistemic uncertainty surrounding the issue that some non-zero level of regard should be given to the idea.
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