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SteveG comments on Should We Shred Whole-Brain Emulation? - Less Wrong
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Just laying some more groundwork... One distinction the discussion requires:
Who is in control of the components and the environment of the emulation?
Possibilities:
An outside entity, attempting to gain economic or other value by using the emulation to complete information processing tasks. (I'll call this "The Boss.")
-The environment was established to maintain the emulation, which is not "given a job," but was created for scientific observation by outsiders.
-The emulation is not given a job, but environment was created by outsiders as a platform for experimentation on emulations.
-Perhaps the emulation was created as an "upload" of a person, or as their designed child or progeny.
-The emulation has a greater or lesser degree of control over its own environment or composition.
Example of lesser degree of control: It can decide to select some of the content it sees and listens to.
Example of greater degree of control: It can directly alter one of its emotions by "twisting a knob."
Suppose that a emulations will be created to study how the brains of flesh-and-blood people work in general, or to study and forecast how a particular, living person will react to stimulus.
This is a reasonable application of high-fidelity whole-brain emulation. To use such emulations to forecast behavior, though, the emulation would have to be "run" on a multi-dimensional distribution of possible future sets of environmental stimuli. The variation in these distributions grows combinatorially, so even tens of thousands of runs would only provide some information about what the person is likely to do next.
Such WBEs would be only one tool in a toolbox to predict human behavior. However, they would be useful for that purpose. Your WBE could be fed many possible future lives, allowing you to make better choices about your future in the physical world, if using WBEs in that manner was considered ethical.
People on this site generally seem to agree, though, that using a high-fidelity WBE as a guinea pig to test out life scenarios is ethically problematic. If these life scenarios were biased in favor of delivering positive outcomes to the WBEs, maybe we would not have as much of a problem with that. Perhaps the interaction of two WBEs could be observed over many scenarios, allowing people to better choose companions.
WBEs could end up being used for this purpose, ethical or not. Again, though, I suspect that more data about people's reactions could be gained if modified WBEs were used in some of the tests.
It's worth exploring, but high-performance neuromorphic or algorithmic minds would still be the better choice for actually controlling physical conditions.