MathMart

Warning: The argument in this post implies bad things about reality, and is likely to be bad for your mental health if it convinces you. If you're not sure if you can handle that, consider skipping this post for now and coming back later. Introduction At my best, when I used to write, I would write characters first by thinking about their personality, beliefs, thoughts, emotions, and situation. Then I would ask myself "what does this person do?", and let mysterious processes inside my brain automatically come up with the behavior of that character. So this is how I define a mental model of a person: the collection of processes and information inside a brain that generates the behavior of some character. My argument in this post is that there do exist mental models of people that are sufficiently detailed to qualify as conscious moral patients; I also argue that this is common enough that authors good at characterization probably frequently create and destroy such people; finally, I argue that this is a bad thing. Part 1: On Data I observe that most of my conscious experience corresponds quite neatly to things we would call data in a computer. Sight and hearing are the most obvious ones, corresponding to computer image and audio files. But it's not too hard to imagine that with advancing robotics and AI, it might be possible to also encode analogues to tactile sensation, smells, or even feelings on a computer. In fact, given that I seem to be able to reason about all my conscious experience, and that reasoning is a form of computation, then it seems that all my conscious experience must necessarily correspond to some form of data in my brain. If there was no data corresponding to the experience, then I couldn't reason about it. So we have one mysterious thing called "conscious experience" which corresponds to data. Yet we don't know much about the former, not even if it has any effect on the world beyond the data it corresponds to. So wouldn't it be simpler i