I was thinking about this for a while and I think I have an insight. A good way to think about computation is to just go with the model of a turing machine. (I don’t know if this includes all kinds of “simulations”, since it seems people are still arguing pretty heavily around whether or not the universe, or an individual section of the universe, is representable by a turing machine and I don’t have the expertise/skill/knowlege/experience/etc to know one way or the other.)
Though, assuming turing machines are okay, I think it’s important to distinguish between what is (and what is part of) the turing machine and what is (and what is part of) the tape (or memory, etc).
A person reading detailed instructions of a torture simulation has that person’s brain as the turing machine and the instructions are the tape.
In this xkcd where a universe is simulated on rocks the tape is the rocks and the turing machine isn’t specified. Some type of omega-level observer would be necessary to ‘run’ the computation.
Is tape without a turing machine a computation? I’d say certainly not.
I would say just having a stack of instructions (say in a flipbook) isn’t morally wrong but that it depends highly on how likely the computation is to be run. Say if there are a bunch of roomba turing machines that start running whatever they come across, it would be very morally bad for one to leave around a bunch of torture sim instruction flipbooks, since that sim would probably get run quite a lot.
Although this all assumes answers to some pretty tough problems have been found. Such as nailing down what a tortured mind consists of and gray areas.
Gray areas like how much fidelity is required; since one could design a torture sim but only run the computation for each 10 second jump, so only a fraction is actually computed but something ‘torture-like’ is going on.
I was thinking about this for a while and I think I have an insight. A good way to think about computation is to just go with the model of a turing machine. (I don’t know if this includes all kinds of “simulations”, since it seems people are still arguing pretty heavily around whether or not the universe, or an individual section of the universe, is representable by a turing machine and I don’t have the expertise/skill/knowlege/experience/etc to know one way or the other.)
Though, assuming turing machines are okay, I think it’s important to distinguish between what is (and what is part of) the turing machine and what is (and what is part of) the tape (or memory, etc).
A person reading detailed instructions of a torture simulation has that person’s brain as the turing machine and the instructions are the tape.
In this xkcd where a universe is simulated on rocks the tape is the rocks and the turing machine isn’t specified. Some type of omega-level observer would be necessary to ‘run’ the computation.
Is tape without a turing machine a computation? I’d say certainly not.
I would say just having a stack of instructions (say in a flipbook) isn’t morally wrong but that it depends highly on how likely the computation is to be run. Say if there are a bunch of roomba turing machines that start running whatever they come across, it would be very morally bad for one to leave around a bunch of torture sim instruction flipbooks, since that sim would probably get run quite a lot.
Although this all assumes answers to some pretty tough problems have been found. Such as nailing down what a tortured mind consists of and gray areas.
Gray areas like how much fidelity is required; since one could design a torture sim but only run the computation for each 10 second jump, so only a fraction is actually computed but something ‘torture-like’ is going on.
I’ll reply to this if I think of any others.