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atucker comments on Torture Simulated with Flipbooks - Less Wrong
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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?
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 
, since they both cover 2, 4, 6
)
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.