How would this work in detail? When I try to think it through, it seems that, if I’m sufficiently good at gathering evidence, then the simulator would have to model Knox at some point while determining which inputs convince me that she’s innocent.
There are shades here of Eliezer’s point about Giant Look-Up Tables modeling conscious minds. The GLUT itself might not be a conscious mind, but the process that built the GLUT probably had to contain the conscious mind that the GLUT models, and then some.
The process that builds the GLUT has to contain your mind, but nothing else. The deceiver tries all exponentially-many strings of sensory inputs, and sees what effects they have on your simulated internal state. Select the one that maximizes your belief in proposition X. No simulation of X involved, and the deceiver doesn’t even need to know anything more about X than you think you know at the beginning.
If whoever controls the simulation knows that Tyrrell/me/komponisto/Eliezer/etc. are reasonably reasonable, there’s little to be gained by modeling all the evidences that might persuade me. Just include the total lack of physical evidence tying the accused to the room where the murder happened, and I’m all yours. I’m sure I care more than I might have otherwise because she’s pretty, and obviously (obviously to me, anyway) completely harmless and well-meaning, even now. Whereas, if we were talking about a gang member who’s probably guilty of other horrible felonies, I’d still be more convinced of innocence than I am of some things I personally witnessed (since the physical evidence is more reliable than human memory), but I wouldn’t feel so sorry for the wrongly convicted.
But remember my original point here: level-of-belief is controlled by the amount of information. In order for me to reach certain extremely high levels of certainty about Knox’s innocence, it may be necessary to effectively simulate a copy of Knox inside my mind.
ETA: And that of course raises the question about whether in that case my beliefs are about the mind-external Knox (“simulated” or not) or the mind-internal simulated Knox. This is somewhat tricky, but the answer is the former—for the same reason that the simple, non-conscious model of Amanda I have in my mind right now represents beliefs about the real, conscious Amanda in Capanne prison. Thus, a demon could theoretically create a conscious simulation of an innocent Amanda Knox in my mind, which could represent a “wrong” extremely-certain belief about a particular external reality. But in order to pull off a deception of this order, the demon would have to inhabit a world with a lot more information than even the large amount available to me in this scenario.
How would this work in detail? When I try to think it through, it seems that, if I’m sufficiently good at gathering evidence, then the simulator would have to model Knox at some point while determining which inputs convince me that she’s innocent.
There are shades here of Eliezer’s point about Giant Look-Up Tables modeling conscious minds. The GLUT itself might not be a conscious mind, but the process that built the GLUT probably had to contain the conscious mind that the GLUT models, and then some.
The process that builds the GLUT has to contain your mind, but nothing else. The deceiver tries all exponentially-many strings of sensory inputs, and sees what effects they have on your simulated internal state. Select the one that maximizes your belief in proposition X. No simulation of X involved, and the deceiver doesn’t even need to know anything more about X than you think you know at the beginning.
If whoever controls the simulation knows that Tyrrell/me/komponisto/Eliezer/etc. are reasonably reasonable, there’s little to be gained by modeling all the evidences that might persuade me. Just include the total lack of physical evidence tying the accused to the room where the murder happened, and I’m all yours. I’m sure I care more than I might have otherwise because she’s pretty, and obviously (obviously to me, anyway) completely harmless and well-meaning, even now. Whereas, if we were talking about a gang member who’s probably guilty of other horrible felonies, I’d still be more convinced of innocence than I am of some things I personally witnessed (since the physical evidence is more reliable than human memory), but I wouldn’t feel so sorry for the wrongly convicted.
But remember my original point here: level-of-belief is controlled by the amount of information. In order for me to reach certain extremely high levels of certainty about Knox’s innocence, it may be necessary to effectively simulate a copy of Knox inside my mind.
ETA: And that of course raises the question about whether in that case my beliefs are about the mind-external Knox (“simulated” or not) or the mind-internal simulated Knox. This is somewhat tricky, but the answer is the former—for the same reason that the simple, non-conscious model of Amanda I have in my mind right now represents beliefs about the real, conscious Amanda in Capanne prison. Thus, a demon could theoretically create a conscious simulation of an innocent Amanda Knox in my mind, which could represent a “wrong” extremely-certain belief about a particular external reality. But in order to pull off a deception of this order, the demon would have to inhabit a world with a lot more information than even the large amount available to me in this scenario.