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If you had access to a scifi-level artificial super intelligence that could simulate anything perfectly at unimaginable speeds, what experiments would you want to run that would be unethical otherwise (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 63 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If everything is being perfectly simulated, most things would still be unethical.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Not if consciousness isn't an emerging phenomena.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

If everything is perfectly simulated, the rules that allow consciousness to emerge are also there, and thus consciousness would emerge, regardless of whether it's a simulation or reality. If we only simulate a consciousness without laws of reality, that consciousness would still be designed to mimic a consciousness from a reality with laws (ours), and since it would be a perfect simulation (and it would have to be so in order to run meaningful tests), that consciousness might as well be as real as us. Thus, unethical.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It’s a pre-existing phenomenon.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We don't know that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Consciousness existing everywhere is the simplest explanation that fits the known fact: that consciousness exists here.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Well we only know that we are conscious ourselves, there are no actual proof that anyone else is conscious. I mean it's probable, but not proven.

So the only thing I can be sure about is that I am conscious, not that anyone else is.