Where do those digits of pi exist? Do they exist in the same sense that I exist, or that my journal entries (stored on my hard drive) exist?

No, of course not. No more than do simulated entities on your hard-drive exist as sentient agents in this universe. As sentient agents, they exist in a simulable universe. A universe which does not require actually running as a simulation in this or any other universe to have its own autonomous existence.

What does it mean for information to 'exist'?

Now I'm pretty sure that is an example of mind projection. Information exists only with reference to some agent being informed.

If my journal entries are deleted, it is little consolation to tell me they can be recovered from the Library of Babel — such a recovery requires effort equivalent to reconstructing them ex nihilo.

Which is exactly my point. If you terminate a simulation, you lose access to the simulated entities, but that doesn't mean they have been destroyed. In fact, they simply cannot be destroyed by any action you can take, since they exist in a different space-time.

That's of little comfort to me, though, if I am informed that I'm living in a simulation on some upuniverse computer, which is about to be decommissioned.

But you are not living in that upuniverse computer. You are living here. All that exists in that computer is a simulation of you. In effect, you were being watched. They intend to stop watching. Big deal!

So it seems that you simply don't take seriously my claim that no harm is done in terminating a simulation, for the reason that terminating a simulation has no effect on the real existence of the entities simulated.

I see turning off a simulation as comparable to turning off my computer after it has printed the first 47,397,123 digits of pi. My action had no effect on pi itself, which continues to exist. Digits of pi beyond 50 million still exist. All I have done by shutting off the computer power is to deprive myself of the ability to see them.

What if you stop the simulation and reality is very large indeed, and someone else starts a simulation somewhere else which just happens, by coincidence, to pick up where your simulation left off? Has that person averted the harm?

perhaps the first rule should be "Do not simulate without sufficient resources to maintain that simulation indefinitely."

There have been some opinions expressed on another thread that disagree with that.

The key question is whether terminating a simulation actually does harm to the simulated entity. Some thought experiments may improve our moral intuitions here.

• Does slowing down a simulation do harm?
• Does halting, saving, and then restarting a simulation do harm?
• Is harm done when we stop a simulation, restore an earlier save file, and then restart?
• If we halt and save a simulation, then never get around to restarting it, the save disk physically deteriorates and is eventually placed in a landfill, exactly at which stage of this tragedy did the harm take place? Did the harm take place at some point in our timeline, or at a point in simulated time, or both?

I tend to agree with your invocation of xenia, but I'm not sure it applies to simulations. At what point do simulated entities become my guests? When I buy the shrink-wrap software? When I install the package? When I hit start?

I really remain unconvinced that the metaphor applies.

I am fascinated by applying the ethic of reciprocity to simulationism, but is a bidirectional transfer the right approach?

Can we deduce the ethics of our simulator with respect to simulations by reference to how we wish to be simulated? And is that the proper ethics? This would be projecting the ethics up.

Or rather should we deduce the proper ethics from how we appear to be simulated? This would be projecting the ethics down.

The latter approach would lead to a different set of simulation ethics, probably based more on historicity and utility. ie "Simulations should be historically accurate." This would imply that simulation of past immorality and tragedy is not unethical if it is accurate.

If I'm following your "logic" correctly, and if you yourself adhere to the conclusions you've set forth, you should have no problem with me murdering your body (if I do it painlessly). After all, there's no such thing as continuity of identity, so you're already dead; the guy in your body is just a guy who thinks he's you.

I think this may safely be taken as a symptom that there is a flaw in your argument.

It is, of course, utterly absurd to think that meat could be the substrate for true consciousness. And what if Simone chooses herself to spend eons simulating a being by hand? Are we to accept the notion of simulations all the way down?

In all honesty, I don't think the the simulation necessarily has to be very fine-grained. Plenty of authors will tell you about a time when one of their characters suddenly "insisted" on some action that the author had not foreseen, forcing the author to alter her story to compensate. I think it plausible that, were I to dedicate my life to it, I could imagine a fictional character and his experiences with such fidelity that the character would be correct in claiming to be conscious. (I suspect such a simulation would be taking advantage of the machinery of my own consciousness, in much the same manner as a VMWare virtual machine can, if properly configured, use the optical drive in its host computer.)

What, then, are the obligations of an author to his characters, or of a thinker to her thoughts? My memory is fallible and certainly I may wish to do other things with my time than endlessly simulate another being. Yet "fairness" and the ethic of reciprocity suggest that I should treat simulated beings the same way I would like to be treated by my simulator. Perhaps we need something akin to the ancient Greeks' concept of xenia — reciprocal obligations of host to guest and guest to host — and perhaps the first rule should be "Do not simulate without sufficient resources to maintain that simulation indefinitely."

Proper posture tends to be more comfortable; surely this is a benefit to myself.

I also apologize to people when I have wronged them, not because they are higher-status than me, but because I do not like being a jackass.

If you were an upload, would you make copies of yourself? Where's the fun in that?

You have a moral obligation to do it

Working in concert, thousands of you could save all the orphans from all the fires, and then go on to right a great many wrongs. You have many many good reasons to gain power.

So unless you're very aware that you will gain power and then abuse power, you will take steps to gain power.

Even from a purely selfish perspective: If 10,000 of you could take over the world and become an elite of 10,000, that's probably better than your current rank.