Flipping through a book doesn’t repeat the computation. I’d say that the process that was used to generate the tortured brain states was the conscious part of this scenario.
If I think to myself 4*5 = 20 does this fail to “repeat the calculation” because I have it cached in my brain instead of having to calculate 5+5+5+5=10+5+5=15+5=20?
Does this mean that if a computer has some values cached instead of physically needing to bang together particles every single time in order to measure the results, this will likewise fail to repeat the “computation”?
Yes, it fails to repeat the computation, simply because there is no machine doing active computation.
Although whether or not using cached values to make a person in a sim think they were tortured is a moral quandary to me. Highly relevant is this lw post linked to elsewhere in this thread here.
Flipping through a book doesn’t repeat the computation. I’d say that the process that was used to generate the tortured brain states was the conscious part of this scenario.
If I think to myself 4*5 = 20 does this fail to “repeat the calculation” because I have it cached in my brain instead of having to calculate 5+5+5+5=10+5+5=15+5=20?
Does this mean that if a computer has some values cached instead of physically needing to bang together particles every single time in order to measure the results, this will likewise fail to repeat the “computation”?
Yes, it fails to repeat the computation, simply because there is no machine doing active computation.
Although whether or not using cached values to make a person in a sim think they were tortured is a moral quandary to me. Highly relevant is this lw post linked to elsewhere in this thread here.