This is an interesting idea. I’m trying to think of it in terms of analogues: you could feasibly replace “digital minds” with “animals” and achieve a somewhat similar conclusion. It doesn’t seem that hard to create vast amounts of animal suffering (the animal agriculture industry has this figured out quite well), so some agent could feasibly threaten all vegans with large-scale animal suffering. And as you say, occasionally following through might help make that threat more credible.
Perhaps the reason we don’t see this happening is that nobody really wants to influence vegans alone. There aren’t many strategic reasons to target an unorganized group of people whose sole common characteristic is that they care about animals. There isn’t much that an agent could gain from a threat.
I imagine the same might be true of digital minds. If it’s anything similar to the animal case, moral circle expansion to digital minds will likely occur in the same haphazard, unorganized way—and so there wouldn’t be much of a reason to specifically target people who care about digital minds. That said, if this moral circle expansion caught on predominantly in one country (or maybe within one powerful company), a competitor or opponent might then have a real use for threatening the digital mind-welfarists. Such an unequal distribution of digital mind-welfarists seems quite unlikely, though.
At any rate, this might be a relevant consideration for other types of moral circle expansion, too.
Thanks for the post, this is an important and under-researched topic.
Some of these well-known chronic pain conditions can be hard to diagnose, too. Chronic pain conditions like fibromyalgia, ME/CFS, rheumatoid arthritis, and irritable bowel syndrome are frequently comorbid with each other, and may also be related to depression and mental health disorders. This overlap probably makes it harder for doctors to tease out the root cause of patients’ symptoms.
As an anecdote, a close relative spent around a year bouncing around various doctors before she got a useful diagnosis, and even then the recommended therapies didn’t help much. So far, her pain is managed best by a diet she found on the internet herself.
I speculate that conventional medicine’s relative lack of machinery for identifying and treating some of these chronic illnesses may cause some patients to turn to pseudoscience instead—which could be another downstream harm of neglecting chronic pain treatments. (I haven’t tried to look for evidence for/against this conclusion.)