Comment on Waterfall Ethics

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:29:07 GMT

I don't think it "creates torture" any more than saying 2+2=4 "creates" the number 4--or, at least that's what I think a computationalist is committed to.

If I have some enumeration of the torture sim in hand, but I haven't performed the computation myself, I have no way of trusting that this enumeration actually corresponds to the torture sim without "checking" the computation. If one thinks that now performing the torture sim on a Turing machine is equivalent to torture, one must also be committed to thinking that checking the validity of the enumeration one already has is equivalent to torture.

But this line of thought seems to imply that the reality of the torture is entirely determined by our state of knowledge about any given step of the turing machine. Which strikes me as absurd. What if one person has checked the computation, and one hasn't, etc. It's essentially the same position that '4' doesn't exist unless we compute it somehow (which, admittedly, isn't a new idea).

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