For my own part, I'm pretty confident labeling as "torturing John Smith" any process that computes all and only the states of John Smith's brain during torture, regardless of how those states are represented and stored, and regardless of how the computation is performed.
More generally (since I have no idea why we're using torture in this example and I find it distasteful to keep doing so) I'm pretty confident saying that any process that computes all and only the states of John Smith's brain during some experience X involves John experiencing X, regardless of how those states are represented and stored, and regardless of how the computation is performed.
I certainly agree that if we describe the computation as being performed "off-camera" (by whatever unimaginable process created it), or being performed by a combination of that ineffable process and manual lookups, or distract attention from the process altogether, our intuitions are led to conclude that X is not experienced... for example, that Searle's Chinese Room is not actually experiencing the human-level Chinese conversations it's involved in.
But I don't find that such intuitions are stable under reflection.
Is John Smith tortured just by the existence of a particular level of truth table (perhaps the one for S(x,t) ) if no one computed it?
Wait, what? You mean, if the states are somehow brought into existence ex nihilo without any process having computed them? I have no idea. I'm not sure the question makes sense.
I think what I want to say about such things is that moral judgments are about actions and events. In this scenario I have no idea what action is being performed and no idea what event occurred, so I don't know how to make a moral judgment about it.
If so, does it matter if someone re-computes that truth table since John Smith is tortured by it anyway?
Well, as above, I'm pretty confident that re-computing the table causes John to experience X (in addition to causing there to have been a John to experience it). I'm not confident what I want to say about the moral implications of identical recomputations of an event that has a certain moral character. My intuitions conflict.
That said, at the moment I'm inclined to say that all the computations have equivalent moral status, and their moral statuses add in the ordinary way for two discrete events, whatever that is.
perhaps there is a way to compute truth tables where a generic person is tortured which still returns accurate S(x,t) without torturing John Smith
If A is sufficiently similar to B, performing a process P on A will allow me to sufficiently accurately predict the results of P(B) without actually performing P(B)... sure. And sure, perhaps there's a way to do this if A is a "generic person" (whatever that means) and B is John Smith.
More generally (since I have no idea why we're using torture in this example and I find it distasteful to keep doing so) I'm pretty confident saying that any process that computes all and only the states of John Smith's brain during some experience X involves John experiencing X, regardless of how those states are represented and stored, and regardless of how the computation is performed.
I was primarily interested in whether there is a continuum of experience ranging from full physical simulation to reading values from disk or a lookup/truth table, or i...
I've been thinking about ethics and brain emulations for a while and now have realized I am confused. Here are five scenarios. I am pretty sure the first is morally problematic, and pretty sure the last is completely innocuous. But I can't find a clean way to partition the intermediate cases.
A) We grab John Smith off the street, scan his brain, torture him, and then by some means, restore him to a mental and physical state as though the torture never happened.
B) We scan John Smith's brain, and then run a detailed simulation of the brain being tortured for ten seconds, and over again. If we attached appropriate hardware to the appropriate simulated neurons, we would hear the simulation screaming.
C) We store, on disk, each timestep of the simulation in scenario B. Then we sequentially load each timestep into memory, and overwrite it.
D) The same as C, except that each timestep is encrypted with a secure symmetric cipher, say, AES. The key used for encryption has been lost. (Edit: The key length is much smaller than the size of the stored state and there's only one possible valid decryption.)
E) The same as D, except we have encrypted each timestep with a one time pad.
I take for granted that scenario A is bad: one oughtn't be inflicting pain, even if there's no permanent record or consequence of the pain. And I can't think of any moral reason to distinguish a supercomputer simulation of a brain from the traditional implementation made of neurons and synapses. So that says that B should be equally immoral.
Scenario C is just B with an implementation tweak -- instead of _calculating_ each subsequent step, we're just playing it back from storage. The simulated brain has the same sequence of states as in B and the same outputs.
Scenario D is just C with a different data format.
Scenario E is just D with a different encryption.
Now here I am confused. Scenario E is just repeatedly writing random bytes to memory. This cannot possibly have any moral significance! D and E are indistinguishable to any practical algorithm. (By definition, secure encryption produces bytes that "look random" to any adversary that doesn't know the key).
Either torture in case A is actually not immoral or two of these adjacent scenarios are morally distinct. But none of those options seem appealing. I don't see a simple clean way to resolve the paradox here. Thoughts?
As an aside: Scenarios C,D and E aren't so far beyond current technology as you might expect. Wikipedia tells me that the brain has ~120 trillion synapses. Most of the storage cost will be the per-timestep data, not the underlying topology. If we need one byte per synapse per timestep, that's 120TB/timestep. If we have a timestep every millisecond, that's 120 PB/second. That's a lot of data, but it's not unthinkably beyond what's commercially available today, So this isn't a Chinese-Room case where the premise can't possibly be realized, physically.