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 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 think PTSD’s mechanism involves memory, but for the sake of the experiment let’s just guarantee the hour doesn’t result in mental or physical injury - the difference is really meant to be that you can either:
I’m trying to drive the choice to be about the experience and whether the promise of forgetting at the end is enough to make you willing to go through the experience of an hour of torture.