Nick: I agree completely. However, in both your scenario and mine, there must come a point at which the subject eventually wakes up. Presumably, if one were awake under anasthetic and watching one’s flesh being mangled, there’d be a certain amount of psychic peturbation; sort of like that Dhantu body-remove torture in Scott Westerfeld’s Risen Empire, if you’ve ever read that. Still, at very least, even if the subject was unconscious and awoke unaware of the damage that had been done to them and without pain afterwards, you still wouldn’t call it surgery.

….I should probably stop thinking about this now. Yes I should.

“anguish of body or mind”

“extreme anguish of body or mind”

“any method by which pain is inflicted”

etc.

So in your virtual session, the damage may not be real, but the pain is… that’s how I ended up with my initial question: what if there was no pain, but there was damage. And to answer myself – the aim (or at least, the likely consequence) of what I outlined is to provoke ‘anguish of mind’. So that would be real torture, too.

Say someone developed a perfect VR machine and plugged in a suspected terrorist without that person’s knowledge. For days, weeks or hours, the suspect undergoes what they believe to be excruciating physical torture, when in fact it’s all just skillful, pain-and-sensory simulated VR. Having subsequently divulged their information or, if innocent, made up enough to satisfy their captors, they are then unplugged, waking – disoriented and frightened – to find themselves whole and strapped to a table, their flesh undamaged.

Which begs the question: in this hypothetical instance, has the Geneva Convention actually been violated? Given the fact of psychological torture, one would think so, because the intent was the same as if actual torture had been employed, a sort of Orwellian descent in the limits of human endurance. Which would, by inference, suggest that simulated drowning, despite the name, cannot be differentiated from torture, the entire point of which is not to kill (or drown), but to extract information under threat of pain and the fear of more to come. How anyone can believe waterboarding doesn’t fall into this category is beyond me; but if a VR torture chamber were invented, would anyone condone – or at least, contemplate – its use as a more ‘moral’ alternative to conventional torture purely on the basis of lack of physical harm?