Torture Simulated with Flipbooks

Consider a slightly different thought experiment. Suppose some government, as it tortured a prisoner, took a brain scanner and took a series of, say, 200 pictures of that person's brain, spaced, one second apart. Those pictures are then printed out, and they can be "flipped through" in the manner you describe. But suppose instead that you simply took the pictures, stacked them, and then put them in a box off in a warehouse somewhere. Does that count as simulated torture? Even better, what if you took the entire box in an airplane, and scattered the pictures out the window so that the wind blew them all over the world. What's the difference here?

While flipping through the printouts creates the illusion of seeing something happen, it is not a simulation. When you watch a movie on DVD, you are not watching some alternate universe where the movie's subject is actually occurring, and the photons are being transmitted into your own universe to be projected out of your TV. It's an optical illusion. Nothing about "flipping" the printouts does anything special, other than create an illusion within your own brain. You are not going to be able to absorb all the data on the sheet anyway (at least not at regular flipping speeds) so there is no chance of your own brain being used as the computing substrate.

Rather, the actual simulated torture in this scenario would be the actual calculations to generate the printouts. That does count as torture, and I would pay to stop it. But once the calculations have been done, it doesn't matter how many pieces of paper come out of the printer.

I'm starting to sympathize with PlaidX's complaint. If what you really want to ask is, "Could a flipbook be conscious?" then why not just say that? The torture is completely irrelevant.

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.

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My instant, cached response is "Obviously not, it's no different from just letting it lay there unflipped, it's not computation, it's not a simulation, it's not concious." ... And that's true, as an answer to the question "is this torture".

BUT, reading the comments, thinking about it a bit more, and the notion that every computation exists and that measure is what counts... And that one very likely candidate for what measure is is the K-complexity of outputting that mind/experience by specifying the laws of physics + a position within that universe where the mind happens to be... It seems suddenly not as implausible, that by acting as POINTERS to FINDING the minds computation, either by looking the pages or photons going all over the universe when it's flipped, this act could indeed increase the measure of the tortured brain state and thus the decision problem might be that the book flipping is indeed a bad thing.

This actually sounds very plausible, but it requires a conjunction of several assumptions to work... Still, depending on the amount of flipping involved and the cost, the remaining probability is enough to reasonably shift decisions.

If this is true, it leads to all sorts of interesting counter-intuitive implications for what kind of physical implementations have which amount of moral weight. At the most extreme end of possibility things like simulating a mind on a Babbage engine made from some rare mix of heavy metals not found in nature might be of greater moral weight than a billion minds running on an opaque architecture implemented in carbon. And I don't consider that a reductio, just immensely counter-intuitive. (and that was an extreme example meant to shock for demonstration, it's unlikely to be THAT bad)

This post made me actually THINK. Upvoted.

I'd say the torture happened once. Even if you make more flipbooks and it changes the measure of the subjective experience, there is only one unique experience. The experience doesn't know if it happened before.

Once the system is closed, I'd think it is morally same for the experience to be simulated once or many times.

You're no more torturing them again than you are killing them again and again when the flipbook finishes its calculation.

Flipping through a book doesn't repeat the computation. I'd say that the process that was used to generate the tortured brain states was the conscious part of this scenario.

This seems to reduce to the question of the moral status of independent identical copies.

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.

Would this count as simulated torture?

Given the way I understand the meaning of "simulation", yes.

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

Neither. People need to stop assuming that by classifying a set of calculations as "simulation" the simulations must automatically experience qualia.

If we assume that computation is an illusion, then we would have to annihilate or alter the actual pattern that we dislike. But does that even make sense?

Relevant Less Wrong posts:

• Beyond the Reach of God
• The mathematical universe: the map that is the territory

I request a post that explains what constitutes a computation.

It could be your copy. Would you feel the pain then? Of course, this would be stored for you in the future. Your copy is always you and will always be you. Substrate does not matter much.

Is this not essentially the Einstein's-brain-as-a-book problem?