To me, it seems much more reasonable that the “pain” is just a property of the ‘time’ evolution of the system. It seems strange to imbue the act of carrying out the computation with ‘causing pain’.
“the act of carrying out the computation” is “the ‘time’ evolution of the system”. And the system needs to have the causal organization that implements the computation.
To actually know what occurred, we must carry out the computation.
Does the act of carrying out the computation change anything about the ‘time’ evolution of the system? Calling it a ‘time’ evolution perhaps puts the wrong emphasis on what I think is important, here. Like another poster has said, “2+2=4” is a good analogue. We can devise a computation that results in the answer to the query “What is 2+2?”, but I don’t think one can argue that actually performing that computation can be equivocated with the result.
When I say ‘time’ evolution, I really mean the thing floating in idea space that is the decideable answer (in a formal sense) to the question “What is the set of subsequent ‘time’ steps of this initial configuration?”
I’m not quite sure what you mean. Computation is a process, not a state (or a configuration of matter). For a physical system to implement a certain computation, it needs to “evolve over time” in a very specific way. You could probably say it’s a series of states that are causally connected in a specific way.
I think the process of computation matters only insofar as we do not know the result of any given computation before performing it.
So say I have performed the torture sim, and say that I have every configuration of the tape listed to a corresponding page of some really long book. Is the computation performed once again if I flip through the book? Or must I physically carry out the computation using some medium (e.g. sea shells)?
To me, it seems that the only difference between the universe before I ran the simulation and the universe after is that I know what occurred in that simulation. The simulation itself, and all of its content (that is, the sequence of states following from the initial state), was already a fact of the universe before I knew about it.
Is the computation performed once again if I flip through the book? Or must I physically carry out the computation using some medium (e.g. sea shells)?
So what is your answer to these questions? Does flipping through the book create torture? And what if you have the algorithm / list of steps / list of tape configurations described in a book before you implement them and run the Turing machine?
I don’t think it “creates torture” any more than saying 2+2=4 “creates” the number 4--or, at least that’s what I think a computationalist is committed to.
If I have some enumeration of the torture sim in hand, but I haven’t performed the computation myself, I have no way of trusting that this enumeration actually corresponds to the torture sim without “checking” the computation. If one thinks that now performing the torture sim on a Turing machine is equivalent to torture, one must also be committed to thinking that checking the validity of the enumeration one already has is equivalent to torture.
But this line of thought seems to imply that the reality of the torture is entirely determined by our state of knowledge about any given step of the turing machine. Which strikes me as absurd. What if one person has checked the computation, and one hasn’t, etc. It’s essentially the same position that ‘4’ doesn’t exist unless we compute it somehow (which, admittedly, isn’t a new idea).
“the act of carrying out the computation” is “the ‘time’ evolution of the system”. And the system needs to have the causal organization that implements the computation.
To actually know what occurred, we must carry out the computation.
Does the act of carrying out the computation change anything about the ‘time’ evolution of the system? Calling it a ‘time’ evolution perhaps puts the wrong emphasis on what I think is important, here. Like another poster has said, “2+2=4” is a good analogue. We can devise a computation that results in the answer to the query “What is 2+2?”, but I don’t think one can argue that actually performing that computation can be equivocated with the result.
When I say ‘time’ evolution, I really mean the thing floating in idea space that is the decideable answer (in a formal sense) to the question “What is the set of subsequent ‘time’ steps of this initial configuration?”
I’m not quite sure what you mean. Computation is a process, not a state (or a configuration of matter). For a physical system to implement a certain computation, it needs to “evolve over time” in a very specific way. You could probably say it’s a series of states that are causally connected in a specific way.
I think the process of computation matters only insofar as we do not know the result of any given computation before performing it.
So say I have performed the torture sim, and say that I have every configuration of the tape listed to a corresponding page of some really long book. Is the computation performed once again if I flip through the book? Or must I physically carry out the computation using some medium (e.g. sea shells)?
To me, it seems that the only difference between the universe before I ran the simulation and the universe after is that I know what occurred in that simulation. The simulation itself, and all of its content (that is, the sequence of states following from the initial state), was already a fact of the universe before I knew about it.
So what is your answer to these questions? Does flipping through the book create torture? And what if you have the algorithm / list of steps / list of tape configurations described in a book before you implement them and run the Turing machine?
I don’t think it “creates torture” any more than saying 2+2=4 “creates” the number 4--or, at least that’s what I think a computationalist is committed to.
If I have some enumeration of the torture sim in hand, but I haven’t performed the computation myself, I have no way of trusting that this enumeration actually corresponds to the torture sim without “checking” the computation. If one thinks that now performing the torture sim on a Turing machine is equivalent to torture, one must also be committed to thinking that checking the validity of the enumeration one already has is equivalent to torture.
But this line of thought seems to imply that the reality of the torture is entirely determined by our state of knowledge about any given step of the turing machine. Which strikes me as absurd. What if one person has checked the computation, and one hasn’t, etc. It’s essentially the same position that ‘4’ doesn’t exist unless we compute it somehow (which, admittedly, isn’t a new idea).