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.
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.