imagine a computer with no internet connection that is locked up in a closet. it can run whatever computations, but it can't hurt anything outside of itself if it's not connected to the internet. just running weird code couldn't be bad. right?
relevant side question: is it possible for a computer to simulate a human brain perfectly? our brains are made out of carbon and such, but it's not the carbon alone that does the thinking, and our thinking does not revolve around carbon. so why can't you design a computer that can simulate a human brain that has thoughts just as real as the thoughts that happen in carbon brains? like, a brain made out of metal. i think you can have such a computer.
imagine a computer so powerful that it could simulate a human brain perfectly, and that it continually introduces pain signals to a simulated brain so that it is eternally tortured. how is this different than taking a carbon human brain out of a real human and sticking it in a machine that does the same thing -- sending pain signals? i say this is immoral.
one would agree the program i mentioned above is immoral. but that is only one example. there is another that only sends pain signals during every other second. and another that makes the brain think it's always inside a human stuck in an underwater cage without oxygen.
out of all of the immoral programs you could write, only one of them is the shortest immoral program. it would be interesting to see which immoral program, when encoded into binary, would be the shortest. i'm talking about the smallest sequence of 0's and 1's that would be immoral to run on a computer -- the shortest immoral program. first we may need some widely accepted definition of immoral, which might be hard to come by. but it is still super weird to think that such a sequence of 0's and 1's exists.
someday, it may be important to not give anyone enough processing power and disk space to run this program. this is because if you give someone 5.381 million terabytes of disk space, you are giving them enough space to store an immoral program. imagine, without any such restriction, your neighbors could be simulating a world full of war and rape inside a little box in their basement and you'd never know. how would you like to know that the world we live in is a simulation being run by some dude outside the universe who is playing what-if with us, and that's why your dog died today? your dog died because the dude outside the universe wanted to see you cry. if that would make you mad, then hopefully you would agree it may be important to not give this kind of processing capacity to just anyone. if the dude was going to see what it would be like if he kept killing all of my family and friends, i know i would wish that someone made it against the law for the dude to simulate our universe.
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"a brain made out of metal. i think you can have such a computer."
ReplyDeleteI disagree here; Brains are not binary, they do not work with 0's and 1's so anything your program under our current understanding of computers will be a gross oversimplification.
"someday, it may be important to not give anyone enough processing power and disk space to run this program"
Thats like saying we shouldn't give anyone a human brain because its powerful enough to run immoral programs. Just because something CAN do something doesn't mean it will
of course brains do not work with 0's and 1's, but with a very powerful computer, why can't you simulate the neurons bouncing around or whatever brains do? it would be like "folding at home" version 10 billion.
Deletehmm, maybe i'm stupid, but how does having a human brain allow you to run immoral programs? i have a brain and i can't run very complicated programs on it.
you say just because something can do something doesn't mean it will. my point was it could, not it would. that's why they don't let you can't walk around your elementary school with a gun. but yes there is another side to it--you can't just lock everyone in the world up because you think they might eventually do something bad.
your brain runs a lot of complicated programs- so complicated in fact that CS people have yet to replicate those algorithms. Are brains "immoral" because they have routines that make people feel pain, suffering, depression, anxiety all without being useful to worldly functioning?
Deleteand by the way, you are the one using the metaphor of a brain as a computer to be simulated. What exactly are you simulating if not the organic "programming" of neurons
DeleteTo simulate a human brain you would have to program illogical possibilities and also the possibilities of irrational and self destructive choices. You would need to develop irrepressible passions and supernatural fantasies. Then you would require a program that can determine how to choose among all these conditions and select a yet undefined moral pathway as a determinate to action. These are not, by definition, impossible. The real difficulty, the one much grander than the others, will be finding a starting point for defining "moral"
ReplyDeletei was thinking of simulating a brain in a simulator that ran at a much lower than the one the brain works on -- perhaps a subatomic level. instead of having brain-logic in the simulator such as "if i feel pain, cry" or "maybe she likes me, so i'll wait for her", the simulator would have atomic level logic like "if this unit of space is free, let this electron go here, otherwise reverse the electron's velocity" and other physics nonsense. you still ultimately end up simulating a brain, if all the brain particles are loaded into the simulator ahead of time and arranged exactly right. you just have atoms that make up brains that are inside a human-made computer rather than inside this universe which could be a simulation being run on god's computer.
Deletemaking something immoral happen inside the simulator is just a matter of copying the contents of a innocent but miserable person's brain and loading it into the simulator. surely (hopefully) most people would agree it would be immoral to cause a mom to re-live the death of her child 1000s of times in a row (restarting the simulation each time), if it was an accurate and real simulation.
While it's clear to me that the physics involved exceed the boundaries of my knowledge, I am nevertheless encouraged by the temper of your quest to suspect that the moral universe would be materially improved if placed under your jurisdiction.
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