What seems off to me is the idea that the ‘player’ is some sort of super-powerful incomprehensible lovecraftian optimizer. I think it’s more apt to think of it as like a monkey, but a monkey which happens to share your body and have write access to the deepest patterns of your thought and feeling(see Steven Byrnes’ posts for the best existing articulation of this view). It’s just a monkey, its desires aren’t totally alien and I think it’s quite possible for one’s conscious mind to develop a reasonably good idea of what it wants. That the OP prefers to push the ‘alien/lovecraftian’ framing is interesting and perhaps indicates that they find what their monkey (and/or other peoples’ monkeys) wants repulsive in some way.
What seems off to me is the idea that the ‘player’ is some sort of super-powerful incomprehensible lovecraftian optimizer. I think it’s more apt to think of it as like a monkey, but a monkey which happens to share your body and have write access to the deepest patterns of your thought and feeling(see Steven Byrnes’ posts for the best existing articulation of this view). It’s just a monkey, its desires aren’t totally alien and I think it’s quite possible for one’s conscious mind to develop a reasonably good idea of what it wants. That the OP prefers to push the ‘alien/lovecraftian’ framing is interesting and perhaps indicates that they find what their monkey (and/or other peoples’ monkeys) wants repulsive in some way.