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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.
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.
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.