This question arises when I consider the moral status of intelligent agents. If I encounter a morally-significant dormant Turing machine with no input devices, do I need to turn it on?

If yes, notice that state N of the machine can be encoded as the initial state of the machine plus the number N. Would it suffice to just start incrementing a counter and say that the machine is running?

If I do not need to turn anything on, I might as well destroy the machine, because the Turing machine will still exist in a Platonic sense, and the Platonic machine won't notice if I destroy a manifestation of it.

David Allen notes that consciousness ought to be defined relative to a context in which it can be interpreted; somewhat similarly, Jacob Cannell believes that consciousness needs some environment in order to be well-defined.

I think the answer to my moral question is that the rights of an intelligent agent can't be meaningfully decomposed into a right to exist and a right to interact with the world.