Consider a slightly different thought experiment. Suppose some government, as it tortured a prisoner, took a brain scanner and took a series of, say, 200 pictures of that person’s brain, spaced, one second apart. Those pictures are then printed out, and they can be “flipped through” in the manner you describe. But suppose instead that you simply took the pictures, stacked them, and then put them in a box off in a warehouse somewhere. Does that count as simulated torture? Even better, what if you took the entire box in an airplane, and scattered the pictures out the window so that the wind blew them all over the world. What’s the difference here?
While flipping through the printouts creates the illusion of seeing something happen, it is not a simulation. When you watch a movie on DVD, you are not watching some alternate universe where the movie’s subject is actually occurring, and the photons are being transmitted into your own universe to be projected out of your TV. It’s an optical illusion. Nothing about “flipping” the printouts does anything special, other than create an illusion within your own brain. You are not going to be able to absorb all the data on the sheet anyway (at least not at regular flipping speeds) so there is no chance of your own brain being used as the computing substrate.
Rather, the actual simulated torture in this scenario would be the actual calculations to generate the printouts. That does count as torture, and I would pay to stop it. But once the calculations have been done, it doesn’t matter how many pieces of paper come out of the printer.
What you’ve said makes sense to me, that the flipbooks do not constitute a calculation. However, it feels like there is a fuzzy boundary somewhere nearby, similar to the fuzzy boundary of what constitutes life. Maybe there is a information theory explanation which relates the two.
If the flipbooks contain enough information to continue the calculation then they are the same as a backup. Ok, so a flipbook is a series of closely spaced backups. What constitutes a calculation? I’ve read about these things, but I’ve never tried to work it out for myself before.
A backup is a static result of a calculation. Static results are static. They don’t count as alive, they don’t count as a calculation.
What counts as a calculation? I’m getting stuck. Let’s say we do the calculation as a state machine. You have static states that are updated according certain rules. State 1 determines/causes state 2. The calculation is implemented somewhere. So there are patterns of matter/energy that represent the states and represent the arithmetic needed to change states. I guess the calculation is here?
It can’t be that it’s static. Time doesn’t exist, at least, not as a basic part of physics.
Still, it seems like the universe is doing the calculation. After all, where else would the output come from?
This makes me wonder, if we were in a universe exactly like this one, except that the laws of physics specified everything exactly, and it matching this universe was a total coincidence, would people have subjective experience?
This makes me wonder, if we were in a universe exactly like this one, except that the laws of physics specified everything exactly, and it matching this universe was a total coincidence, would people have subjective experience?
The problem here is the ‘total coincidence’. This is analogous to watching a video of someone being tortured that was randomly generated. No one is being harmed and it only seems like it because of a massive coincidence. There is still enough data to specify the brain state it your scenario so, given our current knowledge about the brain, it is more likely to have conscious experience than the videotape one. Even with the naive concept of time, it would be very hard to define what constitutes a calculation, and it looks even harder without one.
What does it mean, “specified everything exactly”?
This sounds like a slightly modified (at most) version of timeless physics. A function would deterministically assign arrows to each N-dimensional set of coordinates without even looking at its neighborhood, and this function just happens to define an N+2D surface. Points on the surface would still show the relationships we call causality, and by assumption they still exhibit the functional equivalent of our consciousness.
If you mean Many-Worlds does not apply to that reality, well, we don’t know for sure that our reality doesn’t work by Bohmian mechanics. Maybe we should give this a larger probability. In that case I don’t see myself changing my own probability of having subjective experience.
The uniqueness of a calculation matters. Running the same program twice doesn’t give you a new result.
Does cause and effect (and representation of state) really matter that much? (Dust theory). My answer: still confused.
As a whole, a pattern of behavior of matter/energy can be called a calculation when State 1 causes State 2. When this happens, we can at least point to the calculation. With dust, states do not cause other states, and states can have different representations.
Right now (for at least the next minute) I don’t think calculations exist. There must be some kind of illusion here. Related stuff: timeless physics, static states, causality, consciousness, memory. Memory is static. Consciousness is dynamic. Flipbook pages are static. Calculations are dynamic.
The uniqueness of a calculation matters. Running the same program twice doesn’t give you a new result.
Running the program a second time is definitely an ethical violation. It would be analogous to me torturing you for an hour, wiping your memories of the past hour, and then torturing you for another hour. Alternatively, if I torture “you” in this universe, and then pop on over to the adjacent universe, it’s no less of a crime for me to torture your counterpart.
However, it feels like there is a fuzzy boundary somewhere nearby, similar to the fuzzy boundary of what constitutes life. Maybe there is a information theory explanation which relates the two.
I think that the algorithm used to compute the brain states is also important.
How about a different thought experiment?
A computer program is computing pi, and stumbles upon a stream of numbers which happen to perfectly describe the brain state of a person being tortured for 3 seconds. The program is doing no neural simulation on any level, and its just happening across this sequence. Did torture happen?
The computer is doing calculations to reach the brain-state, but the calculations have nothing to do with torture.
(Another example: a computer computes
, and stumbles across the beginning of the sequence
A computer program is computing pi, and stumbles upon a stream of numbers which happen to perfectly describe the brain state of a person being tortured for 3 seconds. The program is doing no neural simulation on any level, and its just happening across this sequence. Did torture happen?
The computer is doing calculations to reach the brain-state, but the calculations have nothing to do with torture.
I doubt it. Mind processes aren’t static. A person who’s been frozen isn’t consciously feeling that they are frozen. They just aren’t feeling. In the same way, a picture of someone is not a trapped version of them, and a recording of a tortured person’s brain state isn’t a tortured person itself.
Those numbers are just an output of a calculation, but there’s nothing special about the order. The only way that the sequence of digits in pi could “perfectly describe” the brain state is if there is someone to interpret it as such. But there are numbers all around us. There are seven drawers on my desk. There are nine pieces of visual art in this room. Why couldn’t I just interpret those numbers in such a way to describe a tortured person? The actual torture would occur if, as you were looking at the sequence of numbers, you fed them into a simulator of a human brain, and ran the simulation from there.
I think I agree with all but the last sentence. But I definitely would not feel comfortable creating more physical objects that might exhibit probabilistic causality if you knew their source, and that describe perfectly a person feeling torture.
I think I could justify drawing a line between this and the process of flipping, despite the flips creating patterns of photons, because the fact that papers in a box have different patterns of ink on them should have similar effects on the world around them.
I think that the algorithm used to compute the brain states is also important.
How about a different thought experiment?
A computer program is computing pi, and stumbles upon a stream of numbers which happen to perfectly describe the brain state of a person being tortured for 3 seconds. The program is doing no neural simulation on any level, and its just happening across this sequence. Did torture happen?
The computer is doing calculations to reach the brain-state, but the calculations have nothing to do with torture.
(Another example: a computer computes
, and stumbles across the beginning of the sequence
Consider a slightly different thought experiment. Suppose some government, as it tortured a prisoner, took a brain scanner and took a series of, say, 200 pictures of that person’s brain, spaced, one second apart. Those pictures are then printed out, and they can be “flipped through” in the manner you describe. But suppose instead that you simply took the pictures, stacked them, and then put them in a box off in a warehouse somewhere. Does that count as simulated torture? Even better, what if you took the entire box in an airplane, and scattered the pictures out the window so that the wind blew them all over the world. What’s the difference here?
While flipping through the printouts creates the illusion of seeing something happen, it is not a simulation. When you watch a movie on DVD, you are not watching some alternate universe where the movie’s subject is actually occurring, and the photons are being transmitted into your own universe to be projected out of your TV. It’s an optical illusion. Nothing about “flipping” the printouts does anything special, other than create an illusion within your own brain. You are not going to be able to absorb all the data on the sheet anyway (at least not at regular flipping speeds) so there is no chance of your own brain being used as the computing substrate.
Rather, the actual simulated torture in this scenario would be the actual calculations to generate the printouts. That does count as torture, and I would pay to stop it. But once the calculations have been done, it doesn’t matter how many pieces of paper come out of the printer.
What you’ve said makes sense to me, that the flipbooks do not constitute a calculation. However, it feels like there is a fuzzy boundary somewhere nearby, similar to the fuzzy boundary of what constitutes life. Maybe there is a information theory explanation which relates the two.
If the flipbooks contain enough information to continue the calculation then they are the same as a backup. Ok, so a flipbook is a series of closely spaced backups. What constitutes a calculation? I’ve read about these things, but I’ve never tried to work it out for myself before.
A backup is a static result of a calculation. Static results are static. They don’t count as alive, they don’t count as a calculation.
What counts as a calculation? I’m getting stuck. Let’s say we do the calculation as a state machine. You have static states that are updated according certain rules. State 1 determines/causes state 2. The calculation is implemented somewhere. So there are patterns of matter/energy that represent the states and represent the arithmetic needed to change states. I guess the calculation is here?
It can’t be that it’s static. Time doesn’t exist, at least, not as a basic part of physics.
Still, it seems like the universe is doing the calculation. After all, where else would the output come from?
This makes me wonder, if we were in a universe exactly like this one, except that the laws of physics specified everything exactly, and it matching this universe was a total coincidence, would people have subjective experience?
The problem here is the ‘total coincidence’. This is analogous to watching a video of someone being tortured that was randomly generated. No one is being harmed and it only seems like it because of a massive coincidence. There is still enough data to specify the brain state it your scenario so, given our current knowledge about the brain, it is more likely to have conscious experience than the videotape one. Even with the naive concept of time, it would be very hard to define what constitutes a calculation, and it looks even harder without one.
What does it mean, “specified everything exactly”?
This sounds like a slightly modified (at most) version of timeless physics. A function would deterministically assign arrows to each N-dimensional set of coordinates without even looking at its neighborhood, and this function just happens to define an N+2D surface. Points on the surface would still show the relationships we call causality, and by assumption they still exhibit the functional equivalent of our consciousness.
If you mean Many-Worlds does not apply to that reality, well, we don’t know for sure that our reality doesn’t work by Bohmian mechanics. Maybe we should give this a larger probability. In that case I don’t see myself changing my own probability of having subjective experience.
Other points that tickle my mind:
The uniqueness of a calculation matters. Running the same program twice doesn’t give you a new result.
Does cause and effect (and representation of state) really matter that much? (Dust theory). My answer: still confused.
As a whole, a pattern of behavior of matter/energy can be called a calculation when State 1 causes State 2. When this happens, we can at least point to the calculation. With dust, states do not cause other states, and states can have different representations.
Right now (for at least the next minute) I don’t think calculations exist. There must be some kind of illusion here. Related stuff: timeless physics, static states, causality, consciousness, memory. Memory is static. Consciousness is dynamic. Flipbook pages are static. Calculations are dynamic.
Running the program a second time is definitely an ethical violation. It would be analogous to me torturing you for an hour, wiping your memories of the past hour, and then torturing you for another hour. Alternatively, if I torture “you” in this universe, and then pop on over to the adjacent universe, it’s no less of a crime for me to torture your counterpart.
You might find it useful thinking about computations in terms of turing machines and the tape they use: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/5vx/torture_simulated_with_flipbooks/4b7p
I think that the algorithm used to compute the brain states is also important.
How about a different thought experiment?
A computer program is computing pi, and stumbles upon a stream of numbers which happen to perfectly describe the brain state of a person being tortured for 3 seconds. The program is doing no neural simulation on any level, and its just happening across this sequence. Did torture happen?
The computer is doing calculations to reach the brain-state, but the calculations have nothing to do with torture.
(Another example: a computer computes
I doubt it. Mind processes aren’t static. A person who’s been frozen isn’t consciously feeling that they are frozen. They just aren’t feeling. In the same way, a picture of someone is not a trapped version of them, and a recording of a tortured person’s brain state isn’t a tortured person itself.
Those numbers are just an output of a calculation, but there’s nothing special about the order. The only way that the sequence of digits in pi could “perfectly describe” the brain state is if there is someone to interpret it as such. But there are numbers all around us. There are seven drawers on my desk. There are nine pieces of visual art in this room. Why couldn’t I just interpret those numbers in such a way to describe a tortured person? The actual torture would occur if, as you were looking at the sequence of numbers, you fed them into a simulator of a human brain, and ran the simulation from there.
I think I agree with all but the last sentence. But I definitely would not feel comfortable creating more physical objects that might exhibit probabilistic causality if you knew their source, and that describe perfectly a person feeling torture.
I think I could justify drawing a line between this and the process of flipping, despite the flips creating patterns of photons, because the fact that papers in a box have different patterns of ink on them should have similar effects on the world around them.
I pretty much agree with everything said here.
I think that the algorithm used to compute the brain states is also important.
How about a different thought experiment?
A computer program is computing pi, and stumbles upon a stream of numbers which happen to perfectly describe the brain state of a person being tortured for 3 seconds. The program is doing no neural simulation on any level, and its just happening across this sequence. Did torture happen?
The computer is doing calculations to reach the brain-state, but the calculations have nothing to do with torture.
(Another example: a computer computes