Comment on Open Thread June 2010, Part 2

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 02:00:52 GMT

I just realised that infinite processing power creates a weird moral dilema:

Suppose you take this machine and put in a program which simulates every possible program it could ever run. Of course it only takes a second to run the whole program. In that second, you created every possible world that could ever exist, every possible version of yourself. This includes versions that are being tortured, abused, and put through horrible unethical situations. You have created an infinite number of holocausts and genocides and things much, much worse then what you could ever immagine. Most people would consider a program like this unethical to run. But what if the computer wasn't really a computer, it was an infinitely large database that contained every possible input and a corresponding output. When you put the program in, it just finds the right output and gives it to you, which is essentially a copy of the database itself. Since there isn't actually any computational process here, there is no unethical things being simulated. Its no more evil than a book in the library about genocide. And this does apply to the real world. It's essentially the chineese room problem - does a simulated brain "understand" anything? Does it have "rights"? Does how the information was processed make a difference? I would like to know what people at LW think about this.

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