This doesn’t always work: sometimes people develop an avoidance to going to the doctor or thinking about their health problems because of this sort of wireheading.
This doesn’t always work: sometimes people develop an avoidance to going to the doctor or thinking about their health problems because of this sort of wireheading.
Yes, but I’d like to understand how sometimes it does work.
This sounds like the phenomenon known to LW as ugh fields. So the original question to some degree may reduce to: under what circumstances is that phenomenon more inhibited even when there is a strong aversive emotional response? To me, the most obvious hypothesis for the “seeing spiders” case would be that immediate sensory processing is more immune to this than more abstract planning procedures for some reason. But I also would expect the sensory version to show up rarely.
Edited to add: I’ve posted that as a related question, and I also notice that I expect the “learning not to look at things” and “learning not to process things that do show up” subphenomena to be separate and the former to show up more often.
To me, the most obvious hypothesis for the “seeing spiders” case would be that immediate sensory processing is more immune to this than more abstract planning procedures for some reason.
Yeah, it would make sense for evolution to make the brain system that does predicting sensory data have independent reward from the brain system that evaluates how well your day or life is going at the moment.
Your comment made me (vaguely) remember that Scott Alexander (maybe?) wondered something similar in his review of the book Surfing Uncertainty and/or his post Toward a Predictive Theory of Depression. (I haven’t re-read the posts lately, so I’m not confident that they contain relevant information or speculation.)
This doesn’t always work: sometimes people develop an avoidance to going to the doctor or thinking about their health problems because of this sort of wireheading.
Yes, but I’d like to understand how sometimes it does work.
This sounds like the phenomenon known to LW as ugh fields. So the original question to some degree may reduce to: under what circumstances is that phenomenon more inhibited even when there is a strong aversive emotional response? To me, the most obvious hypothesis for the “seeing spiders” case would be that immediate sensory processing is more immune to this than more abstract planning procedures for some reason. But I also would expect the sensory version to show up rarely.
Edited to add: I’ve posted that as a related question, and I also notice that I expect the “learning not to look at things” and “learning not to process things that do show up” subphenomena to be separate and the former to show up more often.
Yeah, it would make sense for evolution to make the brain system that does predicting sensory data have independent reward from the brain system that evaluates how well your day or life is going at the moment.
Your comment made me (vaguely) remember that Scott Alexander (maybe?) wondered something similar in his review of the book Surfing Uncertainty and/or his post Toward a Predictive Theory of Depression. (I haven’t re-read the posts lately, so I’m not confident that they contain relevant information or speculation.)