Should they be allowed to wirehead? Relatedly, is it cruel of me to desire that they not wirehead themselves?
Shouldn’t we just offer them a superior alternative?
Are there philosophical foundations that I could rely on to convince them that, while they might want to wirehead now, after reflecting on those foundations, they would not want to wirehead? Do I endorse those foundations for myself, or am I mistaken in not wanting to wirehead?
You can’t imagine anything superior to wireheading? Sad. (Edit: What!? Come on, downvoters: the entire Fun Theory Sequence was written on the idea that there are strictly better things to do with life than nail your happy-dial at maximum. Disagree if you like, but it’s not exactly an unsupported opinion.)
How should my feelings on wireheading impact my feelings on related issues, like video gaming?
Wait. How are those two the same thing? You can criticize games for being escapist, but then you have to ask: escape from what, to what? What sort of “real life” (ie: all of real life aside from video games, since games are a strict subset of real life) are you intending to state is strictly superior in all cases to playing video games?
You can’t imagine anything superior to wireheading? Sad.
What I cannot imagine at present is an argument against wireheading that reliably convinces proponents of wireheading. As it turns out, stating their position and then tacking “Sad” to the end of it does not seem to reliably do so.
How are those two the same thing?
Obviously they are not the same thing. From the value perspective, one of them looks like an extreme extension of the other; games are artificially easy relative to the rest of life, with comparatively hollow rewards, and can be ‘addictive’ because they represent a significantly tighter feedback loop than the rest of life. Wireheading is even easier, even hollower, and even tighter. So if I recoil from the hollowness of wireheading, can I identify a threshold where that hollowness becomes bad, or should it be a linear penalty, that I cannot ignore as too small to care about when it comes to video gaming? (Clearly, penalizing gaming does not mean I cannot game at all, but it likely means that I game less on the margin.)
What you need here is to unpack your definition of “hollow”.
Let’s go a little further along the spectrum from culturally mainstream definitions of “hollow” to culturally mainstream definitions of “meaningful”.
My hobby is learning Haskell. In fact, just a couple of minutes ago I solved a challenge on HackerRank—writing a convex-hull algorithm in Haskell. This challenged me, and was fun for a fair bit. However, Haskell isn’t my job, and I don’t particularly want a job writing Haskell, nor do I particularly care—upon doing the degree of conscious reflection involved in asking, “Should I spend effort going up a rank on HackerRank, or taking a walk outside in the healthy fresh air?”—about the gamified rewards on HackerRank. From the “objective” point of view, in which my actions are “meaningful” and “non-hollow” when they serve the supergoals of some agent containing me, or some optimization process larger than me (ie: when they serve God, the state, my workplace, academia, humanity, whatever), learning Haskell is almost, but not quite, entirely pointless.
And yet I bet you would still consider it more meaningful and less pointless than a video game, or eating dessert, or anything else done purely for fun.
So again: let’s unpack. I am entirely content to pursue reflectively-coherent fun that is tied up with the rest of reality around me. I can trade off and do Haskell instead of gaming because Haskell is more tied up with the rest of reality around me than gaming. I could also trade off the other way around, as I might if I, for instance, joined a weekly D&D play group. But what I am personally choosing to pursue is reflectively-coherent fun that’s tied up with the rest of reality, not Usefulness to the Greater Glory of Whatever.
Problem is, Usefulness to the Greater Glory of Whatever is, on full information and reflection, itself entirely empty. There is no Greater Whatever. There’s no God, and neither my workplace, nor the state, nor academia, nor “humanity” (which, somehow, never reduces to an actual group of specific individuals), nor evolution possess anything like what most informed people (myself hoping to be included, but alas) would call a property of Meaning-of-Life-Defining-ness. They are, I would say, hollow, in much the same way that you are proposing video-games to be hollow.
I propose that this kind of “hollowness” arises from an infinite recursion in the search for a Grand, Meaning-of-Life-y Supergoal. We’re not in the kind of universe that has one, so there’s no point using that standard in the first place.
What I cannot imagine at present is an argument against wireheading that reliably convinces proponents of wireheading.
When dealing with human emotions, demonstration is usually the only argument. You can’t argue someone into feeding their emotional faculties a proposed scenario in full perceptual detail. The move from conscious, logical faculties to emotional, feeling faculties is a voluntary choice of the person doing the imagining.
Of course, that didn’t stop Eliezer from trying with his Fun Theory Sequence, and a good try it was, too. It’s just not going to convince davkaniks—but nothing does.
You can’t imagine anything superior to wireheading? Sad.
The problem is that since we are not perfectly rational agents we have difficulties estimating the consequences of our actions, and our conscious preferences are probably not consistent with a Von Neuman-Morgenstern utility function.
I don’t want to be wireheaded, but I can’t be sure that if I was epistemically smarter or if my conscious preferences were somehow made more consistent, I would still stand by this decision. My intuition is that I would, but my intuition can be wrong, of course.
Wait. How are those two the same thing? You can criticize games for being escapist, but then you have to ask: escape from what, to what? What sort of “real life” (ie: all of real life aside from video games, since games are a strict subset of real life) are you intending to state is strictly superior in all cases to playing video games?
Video games are designed to be stimulate your brain to perform tasks such as spatial/logical problem solving, precise and fast eye-hand coordination, hunting and warfare against other agents, etc. The brain modules that perform these tasks evolved because they increased your chances of survival and reproduction, and the brain reward system also evolved in a way that makes it pleasurable to practice these tasks since even if the practice doesn’t directly increase your evolutionary fitness, it does it so indirectly by training these brain modules. In fact, all mammals play, especially as juveniles, and many also play as adults.
Video games, however, are superstimuli: If you play Call of Duty your eye-hand coordination becomes better, but unless you are a professional hunter or soldier, or something like that, it doesn’t increase your evolutionary fitness, and even if you are, there would be diminishing returns past a certain point, as the game can stimulate your brain modules much more than any “real world” scenario would. Nevertheless, it is pleasurable.
Many people, including myself would argue that we should not try to blindly maximize our evolutionary fitness. Yet, blindly following hedonistic preferences by indulging in superstimuli also seems questionable. Maybe there is a ideal middle ground, or maybe there is no consistent position. The point is, as Vaniver said, that these are difficult and important questions.
Many people, including myself would argue that we should not try to blindly maximize our evolutionary fitness. Yet, blindly following hedonistic preferences by indulging in superstimuli also seems questionable. Maybe there is a ideal middle ground, or maybe there is no consistent position.
It’s not a one-dimensional spectrum with evolutionary fitness on the one end and blind hedonism on the other end in the first place. Your evaluative psychology just doesn’t work that way. As to why you think there exists any such spectrum or trade-off, well, I blame bad philosophy classes and religious preachers: it’s to the clear advantage of moralizing-preacher-types to claim that normal evaluative judgement has no normative substance, and that everyone needs to Work For The Holy Supergoal instead, lest they turn into a drug addict in a ditch (paging high-school health class, as well...).
Shouldn’t we just offer them a superior alternative?
You can’t imagine anything superior to wireheading? Sad. (Edit: What!? Come on, downvoters: the entire Fun Theory Sequence was written on the idea that there are strictly better things to do with life than nail your happy-dial at maximum. Disagree if you like, but it’s not exactly an unsupported opinion.)
Wait. How are those two the same thing? You can criticize games for being escapist, but then you have to ask: escape from what, to what? What sort of “real life” (ie: all of real life aside from video games, since games are a strict subset of real life) are you intending to state is strictly superior in all cases to playing video games?
What I cannot imagine at present is an argument against wireheading that reliably convinces proponents of wireheading. As it turns out, stating their position and then tacking “Sad” to the end of it does not seem to reliably do so.
Obviously they are not the same thing. From the value perspective, one of them looks like an extreme extension of the other; games are artificially easy relative to the rest of life, with comparatively hollow rewards, and can be ‘addictive’ because they represent a significantly tighter feedback loop than the rest of life. Wireheading is even easier, even hollower, and even tighter. So if I recoil from the hollowness of wireheading, can I identify a threshold where that hollowness becomes bad, or should it be a linear penalty, that I cannot ignore as too small to care about when it comes to video gaming? (Clearly, penalizing gaming does not mean I cannot game at all, but it likely means that I game less on the margin.)
What you need here is to unpack your definition of “hollow”.
Let’s go a little further along the spectrum from culturally mainstream definitions of “hollow” to culturally mainstream definitions of “meaningful”.
My hobby is learning Haskell. In fact, just a couple of minutes ago I solved a challenge on HackerRank—writing a convex-hull algorithm in Haskell. This challenged me, and was fun for a fair bit. However, Haskell isn’t my job, and I don’t particularly want a job writing Haskell, nor do I particularly care—upon doing the degree of conscious reflection involved in asking, “Should I spend effort going up a rank on HackerRank, or taking a walk outside in the healthy fresh air?”—about the gamified rewards on HackerRank. From the “objective” point of view, in which my actions are “meaningful” and “non-hollow” when they serve the supergoals of some agent containing me, or some optimization process larger than me (ie: when they serve God, the state, my workplace, academia, humanity, whatever), learning Haskell is almost, but not quite, entirely pointless.
And yet I bet you would still consider it more meaningful and less pointless than a video game, or eating dessert, or anything else done purely for fun.
So again: let’s unpack. I am entirely content to pursue reflectively-coherent fun that is tied up with the rest of reality around me. I can trade off and do Haskell instead of gaming because Haskell is more tied up with the rest of reality around me than gaming. I could also trade off the other way around, as I might if I, for instance, joined a weekly D&D play group. But what I am personally choosing to pursue is reflectively-coherent fun that’s tied up with the rest of reality, not Usefulness to the Greater Glory of Whatever.
Problem is, Usefulness to the Greater Glory of Whatever is, on full information and reflection, itself entirely empty. There is no Greater Whatever. There’s no God, and neither my workplace, nor the state, nor academia, nor “humanity” (which, somehow, never reduces to an actual group of specific individuals), nor evolution possess anything like what most informed people (myself hoping to be included, but alas) would call a property of Meaning-of-Life-Defining-ness. They are, I would say, hollow, in much the same way that you are proposing video-games to be hollow.
I propose that this kind of “hollowness” arises from an infinite recursion in the search for a Grand, Meaning-of-Life-y Supergoal. We’re not in the kind of universe that has one, so there’s no point using that standard in the first place.
When dealing with human emotions, demonstration is usually the only argument. You can’t argue someone into feeding their emotional faculties a proposed scenario in full perceptual detail. The move from conscious, logical faculties to emotional, feeling faculties is a voluntary choice of the person doing the imagining.
Of course, that didn’t stop Eliezer from trying with his Fun Theory Sequence, and a good try it was, too. It’s just not going to convince davkaniks—but nothing does.
The problem is that since we are not perfectly rational agents we have difficulties estimating the consequences of our actions, and our conscious preferences are probably not consistent with a Von Neuman-Morgenstern utility function.
I don’t want to be wireheaded, but I can’t be sure that if I was epistemically smarter or if my conscious preferences were somehow made more consistent, I would still stand by this decision. My intuition is that I would, but my intuition can be wrong, of course.
Video games are designed to be stimulate your brain to perform tasks such as spatial/logical problem solving, precise and fast eye-hand coordination, hunting and warfare against other agents, etc.
The brain modules that perform these tasks evolved because they increased your chances of survival and reproduction, and the brain reward system also evolved in a way that makes it pleasurable to practice these tasks since even if the practice doesn’t directly increase your evolutionary fitness, it does it so indirectly by training these brain modules. In fact, all mammals play, especially as juveniles, and many also play as adults.
Video games, however, are superstimuli: If you play Call of Duty your eye-hand coordination becomes better, but unless you are a professional hunter or soldier, or something like that, it doesn’t increase your evolutionary fitness, and even if you are, there would be diminishing returns past a certain point, as the game can stimulate your brain modules much more than any “real world” scenario would.
Nevertheless, it is pleasurable.
Many people, including myself would argue that we should not try to blindly maximize our evolutionary fitness. Yet, blindly following hedonistic preferences by indulging in superstimuli also seems questionable. Maybe there is a ideal middle ground, or maybe there is no consistent position. The point is, as Vaniver said, that these are difficult and important questions.
It’s not a one-dimensional spectrum with evolutionary fitness on the one end and blind hedonism on the other end in the first place. Your evaluative psychology just doesn’t work that way. As to why you think there exists any such spectrum or trade-off, well, I blame bad philosophy classes and religious preachers: it’s to the clear advantage of moralizing-preacher-types to claim that normal evaluative judgement has no normative substance, and that everyone needs to Work For The Holy Supergoal instead, lest they turn into a drug addict in a ditch (paging high-school health class, as well...).