Oh. In this case, I agree with you. I never intended to claim otherwise, or even, the whole original point doesn’t make sense without this.
My current view is that it’s not possible to check how the world looks after torture without generating information that approximates simulation of torture itself; however this information can be arbitrarily diluted, and diluting it discounts the moral weight by an appropriate factor. We count this quantitatively.
Under this view, the “final state” automatically counts with the “in between” part.
I never intended to claim otherwise, or even, the whole original point doesn’t make sense without this.
I’m not sure how the original post makes sense if you agree. I understood the original point as:
Through some tricks with physics we can “skip” the middle states when simulating
So we can evaluate actions without instantiating those middle states
This seems to imply that our evaluations don’t need to take into account middle states. Value is definitely not linear, so you can’t do subtraction of the trick states.
This is a problem even if your skip turns out to be possible.
More or less, and as you said the original point was about the possibility of circumventing the “instantiation of middle states”. But if I assumed from the beginning the middle states are not important, it would make no sense to argue that such possibility exists. I saw this as a paradox in which on one hand intuitively, the middle matters, but on the other we can reduce it to something that intuitively seems morally OK (i.e. some unrelated abstract computation).
Your intuition that the middle matters seems to match my current information-theoretic understanding, even if you disagree on what exactly makes it so.
Oh. In this case, I agree with you. I never intended to claim otherwise, or even, the whole original point doesn’t make sense without this.
My current view is that it’s not possible to check how the world looks after torture without generating information that approximates simulation of torture itself; however this information can be arbitrarily diluted, and diluting it discounts the moral weight by an appropriate factor. We count this quantitatively.
Under this view, the “final state” automatically counts with the “in between” part.
I’m not sure how the original post makes sense if you agree. I understood the original point as:
Through some tricks with physics we can “skip” the middle states when simulating
So we can evaluate actions without instantiating those middle states
This seems to imply that our evaluations don’t need to take into account middle states. Value is definitely not linear, so you can’t do subtraction of the trick states.
This is a problem even if your skip turns out to be possible.
More or less, and as you said the original point was about the possibility of circumventing the “instantiation of middle states”. But if I assumed from the beginning the middle states are not important, it would make no sense to argue that such possibility exists. I saw this as a paradox in which on one hand intuitively, the middle matters, but on the other we can reduce it to something that intuitively seems morally OK (i.e. some unrelated abstract computation).
Your intuition that the middle matters seems to match my current information-theoretic understanding, even if you disagree on what exactly makes it so.