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One of the Minds in Ian M Banks' last novel, The Hydrogen Sonata, faces and addresses exactly this problem. Much is at stake, so it's a meaningful discussion.
You may be referring to the hells, but he had a discussion about having a Mind simulating a particular situation to the point where the participants were basically sentient. In that instance, I do not think it is ethical to end the simulation, but I think it would be ethical to freeze the simulation. If the whole simulation was paused and stored with the potential to be restarted, then no perceivable harm would come to the participants.
No this was the simulation of the entire group that was about to subsume as to how they would react to finding out their very important religious document was actually an alien experiment. I think the mind was the Mistake Not... .
Wasn't that in Surface Detail?
@dadifer@lemmy.world is talking about Surface Detail, while I was talking about the Hydrogen Sonata.