I've thought a lot about the morality of potential openworm simulations. How tiny it is and close to being working has made me wonder about some absurd thought experiments.

Imagine a worm hell webpage that had a full neural simulation of the worm with its pain receptors all firing constantly. Would it be immoral to open that page and leave it running? Imagine instead of getting rickrolled by a link, you get wormhelled by a link and cursed with the knowledge your computer just instantiated a worm spirit to hurt it. What if someone made a webpage that had that secretly embedded in the background?

(What about the opposite: what if you had a worm heaven simulation in a webpage? Are you doing anything good by leaving that running for a while and then closing it? Does it make a difference if there's persistence or not?)

Imagine if you placed the worm hell or heaven simulation in a smart contract on a blockchain and made transactions to execute it. The simulation would be executed by every node in the network that verifies the transaction, and it would be executed again by anyone that verifies the blockchain any time in the future.

Certain compressed file and video formats contain instructions for computing the decompressed results. Imagine encoding the worm hell or heaven simulation in a short video file, so that merely viewing the video file causes the computation to happen on your device.

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Well this is pretty moot anyway while we're talking about worms specifically, but at some point it might be doable with higher animals like mice. Or humans. Substitute different animals for worm in any of this.

My current thinking is that computations that don't use their results to meaningfully affect the outside world are meaningless. Nobody who opens the webpage that has it secretly in the background without realizing it is committing any sin. Creating or deliberately accessing the worm hell webpage (without entangling the results meaningfully with the external world) is bad only to the degree that it normalizes the idea in your mind of hurting beings that are fully entangled in our world.

If you simulated a worm hell, and then physically instantiated the resulting worm in real life (say by writing its neural data into the neurons of a real live worm), then you should be considered as having done the moral equivalent of torturing a live worm. If you run worm hell and then give the resulting worm full internet access, then you've done the moral equivalent of torturing a live worm to the degree that worms can live, socialize, and empathize online (which is not much in the case of worms, but is significant for humans).

If you run worm hell and then persist the result, it's bad in the sense that there's continuous potential for the situation to become one of the above. Sharing the results of a worm hell simulation is more bad because it increases the potential for the above.

I don't think there's any moral difference between running two identical deterministic worm hell simulations and saving the results, vs running the worm hell simulation once and saving the results and then copying the results file once. (I don't think copying the results file makes much difference except as much as it increases the risk of sharing the results.)