To the OP: By the quoted statement, do you mean that the human being so represented feels pain as the simulation is being conducted, or merely as a result of the simulation’s initial state existing?
To Vaniver: I’m certainly of the opinion that actually simulating a human (or any other person) under the given circumstances would cause said human to (1) actually exist and (2) actually experience pain. Of course, by “we” you might really mean “you” or some other subset of the site’s population.
I’m not anywhere near so certain about the “initial state” situation, primarily because I don’t seem to have a coherent model of what it fundamentally means to “exist” yet.
Well, I suppose we have to be more clear about what it even means to feel pain “as the simulation is being conducted”. If we accept that pain does occur, then that pain occurring is independent of the way we carry out the simulation. So let’s pretend our turing machine tape is a bunch of sea shells on a sea shore, and I’ve devised a way to carry out an isomorphic set of operations on the sea shells that performs the computation.
We could select the obvious point in time that corresponds to the instant before the “simulation” actually starts feeling pain, as represented by pain receptors firing, as encoded in some configuration of the sea shells. Does the “pain” begin in the next timestep? Is it only a property of completed timesteps (as there is some time it takes me to actually perform the operations on the sea shells)? What if I just stop, mid timestep?
To me, it seems much more reasonable that the “pain” is just a property of the ‘time’ evolution of the system. It seems strange to imbue the act of carrying out the computation with ‘causing pain’.
I agree with that argument. That is to say, I find it intuitively appealing. But I also find the converse argument (things shouldn’t be said to exist just because someone wrote down a mathematical equation that might give rise to them) equally intuitively appealing.
(This line of reasoning has occurred here before, by the way. See also that post’s predecessors.)
All things considered my current position is, I don’t understand what’s going on well enough to come to any certain conclusion. I make the distinction of actually conducting the simulation purely because it seems the slightly more appealing of the two.
To me, it seems much more reasonable that the “pain” is just a property of the ‘time’ evolution of the system. It seems strange to imbue the act of carrying out the computation with ‘causing pain’.
“the act of carrying out the computation” is “the ‘time’ evolution of the system”. And the system needs to have the causal organization that implements the computation.
To actually know what occurred, we must carry out the computation.
Does the act of carrying out the computation change anything about the ‘time’ evolution of the system? Calling it a ‘time’ evolution perhaps puts the wrong emphasis on what I think is important, here. Like another poster has said, “2+2=4” is a good analogue. We can devise a computation that results in the answer to the query “What is 2+2?”, but I don’t think one can argue that actually performing that computation can be equivocated with the result.
When I say ‘time’ evolution, I really mean the thing floating in idea space that is the decideable answer (in a formal sense) to the question “What is the set of subsequent ‘time’ steps of this initial configuration?”
I’m not quite sure what you mean. Computation is a process, not a state (or a configuration of matter). For a physical system to implement a certain computation, it needs to “evolve over time” in a very specific way. You could probably say it’s a series of states that are causally connected in a specific way.
I think the process of computation matters only insofar as we do not know the result of any given computation before performing it.
So say I have performed the torture sim, and say that I have every configuration of the tape listed to a corresponding page of some really long book. Is the computation performed once again if I flip through the book? Or must I physically carry out the computation using some medium (e.g. sea shells)?
To me, it seems that the only difference between the universe before I ran the simulation and the universe after is that I know what occurred in that simulation. The simulation itself, and all of its content (that is, the sequence of states following from the initial state), was already a fact of the universe before I knew about it.
Is the computation performed once again if I flip through the book? Or must I physically carry out the computation using some medium (e.g. sea shells)?
So what is your answer to these questions? Does flipping through the book create torture? And what if you have the algorithm / list of steps / list of tape configurations described in a book before you implement them and run the Turing machine?
I don’t think it “creates torture” any more than saying 2+2=4 “creates” the number 4--or, at least that’s what I think a computationalist is committed to.
If I have some enumeration of the torture sim in hand, but I haven’t performed the computation myself, I have no way of trusting that this enumeration actually corresponds to the torture sim without “checking” the computation. If one thinks that now performing the torture sim on a Turing machine is equivalent to torture, one must also be committed to thinking that checking the validity of the enumeration one already has is equivalent to torture.
But this line of thought seems to imply that the reality of the torture is entirely determined by our state of knowledge about any given step of the turing machine. Which strikes me as absurd. What if one person has checked the computation, and one hasn’t, etc. It’s essentially the same position that ‘4’ doesn’t exist unless we compute it somehow (which, admittedly, isn’t a new idea).
Ah, a proof by contradiction that we are not computationalists!
To the OP: By the quoted statement, do you mean that the human being so represented feels pain as the simulation is being conducted, or merely as a result of the simulation’s initial state existing?
To Vaniver: I’m certainly of the opinion that actually simulating a human (or any other person) under the given circumstances would cause said human to (1) actually exist and (2) actually experience pain. Of course, by “we” you might really mean “you” or some other subset of the site’s population.
I’m not anywhere near so certain about the “initial state” situation, primarily because I don’t seem to have a coherent model of what it fundamentally means to “exist” yet.
Well, I suppose we have to be more clear about what it even means to feel pain “as the simulation is being conducted”. If we accept that pain does occur, then that pain occurring is independent of the way we carry out the simulation. So let’s pretend our turing machine tape is a bunch of sea shells on a sea shore, and I’ve devised a way to carry out an isomorphic set of operations on the sea shells that performs the computation.
We could select the obvious point in time that corresponds to the instant before the “simulation” actually starts feeling pain, as represented by pain receptors firing, as encoded in some configuration of the sea shells. Does the “pain” begin in the next timestep? Is it only a property of completed timesteps (as there is some time it takes me to actually perform the operations on the sea shells)? What if I just stop, mid timestep?
To me, it seems much more reasonable that the “pain” is just a property of the ‘time’ evolution of the system. It seems strange to imbue the act of carrying out the computation with ‘causing pain’.
I agree with that argument. That is to say, I find it intuitively appealing. But I also find the converse argument (things shouldn’t be said to exist just because someone wrote down a mathematical equation that might give rise to them) equally intuitively appealing.
(This line of reasoning has occurred here before, by the way. See also that post’s predecessors.)
All things considered my current position is, I don’t understand what’s going on well enough to come to any certain conclusion. I make the distinction of actually conducting the simulation purely because it seems the slightly more appealing of the two.
“the act of carrying out the computation” is “the ‘time’ evolution of the system”. And the system needs to have the causal organization that implements the computation.
To actually know what occurred, we must carry out the computation.
Does the act of carrying out the computation change anything about the ‘time’ evolution of the system? Calling it a ‘time’ evolution perhaps puts the wrong emphasis on what I think is important, here. Like another poster has said, “2+2=4” is a good analogue. We can devise a computation that results in the answer to the query “What is 2+2?”, but I don’t think one can argue that actually performing that computation can be equivocated with the result.
When I say ‘time’ evolution, I really mean the thing floating in idea space that is the decideable answer (in a formal sense) to the question “What is the set of subsequent ‘time’ steps of this initial configuration?”
I’m not quite sure what you mean. Computation is a process, not a state (or a configuration of matter). For a physical system to implement a certain computation, it needs to “evolve over time” in a very specific way. You could probably say it’s a series of states that are causally connected in a specific way.
I think the process of computation matters only insofar as we do not know the result of any given computation before performing it.
So say I have performed the torture sim, and say that I have every configuration of the tape listed to a corresponding page of some really long book. Is the computation performed once again if I flip through the book? Or must I physically carry out the computation using some medium (e.g. sea shells)?
To me, it seems that the only difference between the universe before I ran the simulation and the universe after is that I know what occurred in that simulation. The simulation itself, and all of its content (that is, the sequence of states following from the initial state), was already a fact of the universe before I knew about it.
So what is your answer to these questions? Does flipping through the book create torture? And what if you have the algorithm / list of steps / list of tape configurations described in a book before you implement them and run the Turing machine?
I don’t think it “creates torture” any more than saying 2+2=4 “creates” the number 4--or, at least that’s what I think a computationalist is committed to.
If I have some enumeration of the torture sim in hand, but I haven’t performed the computation myself, I have no way of trusting that this enumeration actually corresponds to the torture sim without “checking” the computation. If one thinks that now performing the torture sim on a Turing machine is equivalent to torture, one must also be committed to thinking that checking the validity of the enumeration one already has is equivalent to torture.
But this line of thought seems to imply that the reality of the torture is entirely determined by our state of knowledge about any given step of the turing machine. Which strikes me as absurd. What if one person has checked the computation, and one hasn’t, etc. It’s essentially the same position that ‘4’ doesn’t exist unless we compute it somehow (which, admittedly, isn’t a new idea).
Indeed, read “we are not” as “not all of us are.”
Certainly. Objection withdrawn, then.