For the sake of clarity, the first news I saw about the EFF stopping accepting of Bitcoins was two weeks ago:

EFF no longer accepts donations in Bitcoins (bitcoinmoney.com) | HN link

The EFF blog post is I think an announcement insofar as to address the kind of news above that was floating around but mostly an explanation.

What you've said makes sense to me, that the flipbooks do not constitute a calculation. However, it feels like there is a fuzzy boundary somewhere nearby, similar to the fuzzy boundary of what constitutes life. Maybe there is a information theory explanation which relates the two.

If the flipbooks contain enough information to continue the calculation then they are the same as a backup. Ok, so a flipbook is a series of closely spaced backups. What constitutes a calculation? I've read about these things, but I've never tried to work it out for myself before.

A backup is a static result of a calculation. Static results are static. They don't count as alive, they don't count as a calculation.

What counts as a calculation? I'm getting stuck. Let's say we do the calculation as a state machine. You have static states that are updated according certain rules. State 1 determines/causes state 2. The calculation is implemented somewhere. So there are patterns of matter/energy that represent the states and represent the arithmetic needed to change states. I guess the calculation is here?

If I think to myself 4*5 = 20 does this fail to "repeat the calculation" because I have it cached in my brain instead of having to calculate 5+5+5+5=10+5+5=15+5=20?

Does this mean that if a computer has some values cached instead of physically needing to bang together particles every single time in order to measure the results, this will likewise fail to repeat the "computation"?

I happen to agree with you 100%, but let me note that this line of reasoning has some strange conclusions. It implies that it is the same to torture one computer-simulated consciousness to torturing 100 clones of him at the same time the same way. But when one of the simulations has an accidental bit-flip due to hardware error, it is not the same anymore. Similarly, if you torture 100 different computer-simulated consciousnesses by a deterministic process, but during the simulation two of them become identical, it means that now there are only 99 people tortured.

Would this count as simulated torture? If so, would you care about stopping it, or is it different from computer-simulated torture?

Cute idea!

The computations involved in producing the clipbook count as a torture sim. Flipping through the flipbooks just counts as some sort of twisted torture-porn fetish.

I was thinking about this for a while and I think I have an insight. A good way to think about computation is to just go with the model of a turing machine. (I don't know if this includes all kinds of "simulations", since it seems people are still arguing pretty heavily around whether or not the universe, or an individual section of the universe, is representable by a turing machine and I don't have the expertise/skill/knowlege/experience/etc to know one way or the other.)

Though, assuming turing machines are okay, I think it's important to distinguish between what is (and what is part of) the turing machine and what is (and what is part of) the tape (or memory, etc).

A person reading detailed instructions of a torture simulation has that person's brain as the turing machine and the instructions are the tape.

In this xkcd where a universe is simulated on rocks the tape is the rocks and the turing machine isn't specified. Some type of omega-level observer would be necessary to 'run' the computation.

Is tape without a turing machine a computation? I'd say certainly not.

I would say just having a stack of instructions (say in a flipbook) isn't morally wrong but that it depends highly on how likely the computation is to be run. Say if there are a bunch of roomba turing machines that start running whatever they come across, it would be very morally bad for one to leave around a bunch of torture sim instruction flipbooks, since that sim would probably get run quite a lot.

Although this all assumes answers to some pretty tough problems have been found. Such as nailing down what a tortured mind consists of and gray areas.

Gray areas like how much fidelity is required; since one could design a torture sim but only run the computation for each 10 second jump, so only a fraction is actually computed but something 'torture-like' is going on.

I'll reply to this if I think of any others.

HN discussion with some interesting comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2561354

This has been discussed a few places on LW already. See for example here.