fucked up question, I know - but ultimately it’s a question about suffering and experience of personhood - did “you” really experience the torture for an hour if you don’t remember it later?
What about the hour where you were awake and present, before the memory is wiped? How much does that suffering matter? Does the fact that after the torture you won’t remember override the suffering you will experience in the present during the torture, relative to suffering you will remember the rest of your life?
I think you’d like Severance first of all.
Second, if I do not remember it at ALL like including trauma responses or subconscious stuff, then the hour. EZ
Yes, though second season was disappointing to me, I really enjoyed first season.
And yes, I think in this case there is no memory as though you had been under anaesthesia (but unlike anaesthesia, you will be fully conscious the whole hour and experience the suffering - so this is a bit adjacent to a Severance situation, someone is suffering and that someone is you, still).
Don’t touch my memories, they’re already fragile enough I don’t need someone I don’t know rolting around in there. I’ll take the lucid torture.
I think I’d treat it like Odysseus meeting the sirens. I could avoid the whole memory, but there’s a chance I could learn something from the encounter. Might put my life into perspective or something.
Ngl, I’ve had things done to me that approached torture. I’ve had injuries bad enough that they might as well have been.
I can handle almost anything for a minute, as long as it doesn’t kill me.
But an hour? You aren’t coming out of that with the same level of health you went into it with, so remembering isn’t important. Hell, I’d even say that having the consequences of the torture and not knowing how it happened is a form of torture itself.
There’s also the possibility, since you’re exploring the hypothetical beyond just seeing what people say, that you would have the memories, just buried and inaccessible to your conscious mind. That actually happens with some trauma anyway.
There’s also the fact that part of some anaesthesia is drugs that block memory formation. So people have gone through what might be considered torture with their memories not being present afterward. So far, I’ve never seen reports of someone later gaining access to any memories from during surgery when those drugs are used. Some when they were not quite under, and some from after surgery, but before they were “awake” (which I’ve experienced), but not the period when memory formation was suppressed.
So, as an argument for the memory wipe option, it could be a solid pick, if you add in that neither torture session would result in injury or illness. But, anything that you’d think of as torture normally isn’t going to be risk free in the real world.
I wonder if this question doesn’t say more about the psychology of the person being asked. People vary in the degree to which they identify with their future selves. I believe this characteristic is often called psychological connectedness. It seems that people who have a stronger psychological connectedness would likely prefer the erased hour. Personally, I’m more inclined to choose the one minute, because the immediate experience feels more real to me. However, I think some of the technical questions about the long term impact of being tortured complicate things. Like would I be suffering PTSD for the next 20 years? If so, then things become much less apples-to-apples.
I may be mistaken, but isn’t the first what basically happens during surgery? Though I think it’s more along the lines of anesthesia prevents the formation of memories. Potato potato.
No, this is a misconception of how twilight anaesthesia works.
