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Doug_S. comments on Pascal's Mugging: Tiny Probabilities of Vast Utilities - Less Wrong
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Random question:
The number of possible Turing machines is countable. Given a function that maps the natural numbers onto the set of possible Turing machines, one can construct a Turing machine that acts like this:
If machine #1 has not halted, simulate the execution of one instruction of machine #1
If machine #2 has not halted, simulate the execution of one instruction of machine #2
If machine #1 has not halted, simulate the execution of one instruction of machine #1
If machine #3 has not halted, simulate the execution of one instruction of machine #3
If machine #2 has not halted, simulate the execution of one instruction of machine #2
If machine #1 has not halted, simulate the execution of one instruction of machine #1
etc.
This Turing machine, if run, would eventually make all possible computations. (One could even run a program like this on a real, physical computer, subject to memory and time limitations.) Does running such a program have any ethical implications? If running a perfect simulation of a reality is essentially the same as creating that reality, would running this program for a long enough period of time actually cause all possible computable universes to come into existence? Does the existence of this program have any implications for the hypothesis that "our universe is a computer simulation being run in another universe?"
I've long felt that simulations are NOT the same as actual realities, though I can't precisely articulate the difference.
One of them has some form of computational device on the outside. One of them doesn't. Does there need to be more difference than that? ie. If you want to treat them differently and if some sort of physical distinction between the two is possible then by all means consider them different based on that difference.
The answer seems fairly simple under modal realism (roughly, the thesis that all logically possible worlds exist in the same sense as mathematical facts exist, and thus that the term "actual" in "our actual world" is just an indexical).
If the simulation accurately follows a possible world, and contains a unit of (dis)utility, it doesn't generate that unit of (dis)utility, it just "discovers" it; it proves that for a given world-state an event happens which your utility function assigns a particular value. Repeating the simulation again is also only rediscovering the same fact, not in any sense creating copies of it.