Why privilege the physical movement of the seashells? What if I move the seashells into position for timestep 35469391 and then mentally imagine the position of the seashells at timestep 35469392? You could say I am “performing the calculation,” but you could also say I am “discovering the result of propagating forward the initial conditions.”
I don’t think our intuitions about what “really happens” are useful. I think we have to zoom out at least one level and realize that our moral and ethical intuitions only mean anything within our particular instantiation of our causal framework. We can’t be morally responsible for the notional space of computable torture simulations because they exist whether or not we “carry them out.” But perhaps we are morally responsible for particular instantiations of those algorithms.
I don’t know the answer—but I don’t think the answer is that performing mechanical operations with seashells reifies torture but writing down the algorithm does not.
Why privilege the physical movement of the seashells? What if I move the seashells into position for timestep 35469391 and then mentally imagine the position of the seashells at timestep 35469392? You could say I am “performing the calculation,” but you could also say I am “discovering the result of propagating forward the initial conditions.”
I don’t think our intuitions about what “really happens” are useful. I think we have to zoom out at least one level and realize that our moral and ethical intuitions only mean anything within our particular instantiation of our causal framework. We can’t be morally responsible for the notional space of computable torture simulations because they exist whether or not we “carry them out.” But perhaps we are morally responsible for particular instantiations of those algorithms.
I don’t know the answer—but I don’t think the answer is that performing mechanical operations with seashells reifies torture but writing down the algorithm does not.
Mental imaging also suffices to perform the computation.
I don’t have coherent thoughts about why knowing the algorithm is morally distinct from knowing its output.