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Wes_W comments on Morality of Doing Simulations Is Not Coherent [SOLVED, INVALID] - Less Wrong
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But a miracle occurs, and your physics simulation still works accurately for the individual components...?
I get that your assumption of "linear physics" gives you this. But I don't see any reason to believe that physics is "linear" in this very weird sense. In general, when you do calculations with garbage, you get garbage. If I time-evolve a simulation of (my house plus a bomb) for an hour, then remove all the bomb components at the end, I definitely do not get the same result as running a simulation with no bomb.
Well, actually, physics appears to be perfectly linear... if you work purely quantum level. In which case adding R is just simulating R, and also simulating you, pretty much independently. In which case no, it isn't garbage. It's two worlds being simulated in parallel.
It seems to me you are taking my assumption of linearity on the wrong level. To be exact, I need the assumption of linearity of the operator of calculating future-time snapshots (fixed in the article).
This is entirely different from your example.
Imagine for example how the Fourier Transform is linear as an operation.
OK. I think I see what you are getting at.
First, one could simply reject your conclusion:
The argument here is something like "just because you did the calculations differently doesn't mean your calculations failed to simulate a consciousness". Without a real model of how computation gives rise to consciousness (assuming it does), this is hard to resolve.
Second, one could simply accept it: there are some ways to do a given calculation which are ethical, and some ways that aren't.
I don't particularly endorse either of these, by the way (I hold no strong position on simulation ethics in general). I just don't see how your argument establishes that simulation morality is incoherent.