From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sun Jan 05 2003 - 11:09:51 MST
Eliezer writes
> Morality is a function over 4D spacetimes, not 3D spaces. If you
> terminate an existing mind, the termination event is undesirable.
> Declining to create a *new* unhappy mind is not morally equivalent to
> *killing* an unhappy mind.... instantiating a particular mind has
> no effect; it already has a Platonic existence or whatever.
Not so. Whether or not a mind or program obtains actual execution
time is extremely important in any consistent value system I know
of. It is as ludicrous to suppose that starting execution of a
process has no effect as it would be to suppose that termination
of a process has no effect.
Declining to create a "new unhappy mind" is not legally equivalent
to killing an "unhappy mind", but morally? This must be carefully
examined. Now if A and B are two pre-existing minds symmetrically
related, then A's termination of B indeed does violate traditional
morality: in terms of game theory, A is defecting, not cooperating;
in terms of familiar morality, A is contravening the Golden Rule.
But what about the case where a pre-existing pattern, whether it's
on disk or in platonic space, is to be issued run time?
Suppose that I have written a screen-saver which is necessarily
much more primitive than I am. Who will decide whether it has
a mind? We can either presume to determine a potentially NP
incomplete set of rules and impose them globally, or we can
allow such decisions to be made locally, and refrain from the
use of force. It should be up to me whether or not and to what
degree my screen-saver is pre-empted by other tasks, whether
my screen-saver is placed on an extinction schedule where it
gets 1 second of run time per 10^10^n seconds (where n is the
execution count), or whether my screen-saver is terminated
by me and another written to replace it.
If indeed we are living in a simulation, then the chances are
extremely good that the simulation was created by someone who
is free to interrupt it. That Entity who some call God would
have little incentive to have authored our existence were He
under the threat of dire punishment from an even higher source.
Lee
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