The Potential Hells You Could Create with Mind-Uploading

People talk glowingly about these transhumanist ideals such as the 'singularity' where we all upload ourselves onto something like the matrix. But it should be obvious just how much potential for evil it has. If you assume that a person who has uploaded their brain will live in this matrix, paradise or afterlife indefinitely or until they voluntarily decided to have themselves terminated and that their digital body and brain are exposed to some programmer, you could conceive of all sorts of nightmare scenarios of torture, depravity and despair. But even without having gone that far there are hellish possibilities. You could erase someone's memory then have them live through a sick game in which they have to run for their life like in that black mirror episode 'white bear'. You could have access to their memories and force them to relive traumas. These are possible in the near future with improved understanding of the brain. But the hell begins really with uploading. The potential for punishment would be infinite. You could make a murderer relive the deaths of his victims, through their eyes. This would be especially egregious for genocides and war criminals who would potentially live through thousands of deaths. You could create a form of Alzheimer's which lasts hundreds of years so that you have a fuzzy memory of the past and have moments of amnesia which last days or weeks. You could implant cancers in the brain. You could create a tintinabullant which causes the listener to hear a very high pitched monotone electronic sound in their head for their entire lives. The question would be how to police those who are in charge of the matrix or the digital world so that they could not create a real hell that would satisfy their sick pleasures. How would a digital person have the ability to intervene in the physical world? You could make a human relive horrible lives infinite amount of times while giving them just enough hope so they believe they have escaped it before restarting that same life. When thinking about pain and suffering, the inverse of Nozick's 'pleasure machine' apply. Imagine a machine that would stimulate only your pain centers. But alternatively the brain might get numbed by the pain and you have to introduce some form of relief or respite to lower the pain threshold. In the same way then you could conceive of more imaginative forms pain such as emotional suffering from loss of loved one. You could make mothers relive the lives of a tragically early lost child over and over again. This is reminiscent of Sisyphus rolling his rock up the hill or Nietzsche's eternal recurrence or return. It makes you question why Christians put so much emphasis on suffering, don't they wonder what kind of sick god would find pleasure out of seeing the suffering of his people?


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