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My belief that other people have conscious experience and my belief that that conscious experience matters are not the same belief. The belief that other people's experiences matter to me is something that comes from my moral framework -- and yes, many people use religious teachings as their moral framework, so in that sense you could view it as similar to religion. But again, it's helpful to distinguish between that-which-is and that-which-should-be. I do expect that my sense of that which should be is downstream of some empirically verifiable properties of multi-agent systems, and also a shit-ton of random chance, but I don't have super strong intuitions for what those properties are, nor do I think that I'm morally obligated to change my own behavior away from what my moral intuitions say I should do just because I learn something new about game theory.
I don't think video game characters have conscious experiences. That seems like a pretty non-extreme viewpoint to me "video game characters are conscious", as a world model, generates quite bad predictions about future observations. In a pure consequentialist sense, I do expect it's fairly likely that the game designers will punish the player's decision to rip off a character, but also it's not like winning the game is a moral obligation, so I might rip off a video game character because I expect that to lead to more entertaining dialogue.
Honestly though, what position are you even trying to argue for here? I am very skeptical that you endorse the solipsist position yourself (though if you do I expect your reasoning there, and particularly any observations you could make that would convince you that it wasn't true, would be an interesting conversation).
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