An entity can be said to have been ‘wireheaded’ if it supplies itself with information either monotonically increasing its utility function to an arbitrary level, or if this utility function is set to whatever its maximum possible value might be. I would not expect doing this to maximize the total amount of pleasure in the universe, because of the following thought experiment:
Imagine a wireheaded creature. This creature would probably gradually lose all of the internal structure with which it used too experience sensations other than pleasure, or at least cease to have any conscious experience running on these ‘obsolete’ areas. This would cause it to take a remarkably simple form and lose its ability to interface with the outside world. It seems plausible that such a creature could be an ebborian brain, or at least that its conscious experiences could be implemented on an ebborian brain. (For the rest of this post, I will refer to the blob of matter in which the homogeneous pleasure is experienced as an ‘ebborian brain’ for convenience; apologies if my use of the term is slightly inappropriate, the main point I’m trying to convey is that it’s a kind of conscious analogue computer whose simple structure could be duplicated without affecting the way in which information flows through it. In reality, such a ‘brain’ wouldn’t necessarily need to be 2 dimensional.)
The effect of doubling its utility function would then amount to doubling the intensity of some analogue signal propagating through a particular area of the ebborian brain where the pleasure was experienced, for example electrical current. This could be achieved by multiplying the dimension orthogonal to those within which information propagated to obtain an ebborian brain with double the mass. The ebborian brain would not be aware of itself being sliced and partitioned into two smaller ebborian brains of the original dimensions along this plane, as no information propagates through it. This would produce two ebborian brains, and because the mind running on them would not notice that it had been instantiated on two separate substrates, it would remain a single mind. I claim that its conscious experience would be no more intense, or pleasurable, than it would be if it were running on a single brain, although I am not sure of this.
One argument for this is that it seems clear that the capacity of the (e.g. human) brain to process information in an abstract way (i.e. not dependent on things like scale) is one of the factors, if not the key factor, which differentiates it from other parts of the body, and it is also the only one which seems to know that it is conscious. It therefore seems likely that if a brain were doubled in size, along with each of the subatomic particles inside each atom inside each molecule in each of its neurones, its consciousness would not itself double. Given this, it seems likely that the ‘thickening/extrusion’ process would not change the conscious experience of the mind running on each slice of the ebborian brain.
This implies that multiple wireheaded entities would have no (or only a little) more conscious experience than a single one, and this may not even depend on the proportion of worlds in which one exists (since these entities cannot see the world in which they exist and differentiate it from others) . It therefore makes little sense to convert any particular mind into a ‘monolithic’ one through wireheading (unless doing so would allow it to retain the other intricacies of its conscious experience), as this would only increase the number of such entities in existence by one, which has been established by the above argument not to increase the total pleasure in the universe, while also effectively deleting the original mind.
An argument against wireheading:
An entity can be said to have been ‘wireheaded’ if it supplies itself with information either monotonically increasing its utility function to an arbitrary level, or if this utility function is set to whatever its maximum possible value might be. I would not expect doing this to maximize the total amount of pleasure in the universe, because of the following thought experiment:
Imagine a wireheaded creature. This creature would probably gradually lose all of the internal structure with which it used too experience sensations other than pleasure, or at least cease to have any conscious experience running on these ‘obsolete’ areas. This would cause it to take a remarkably simple form and lose its ability to interface with the outside world. It seems plausible that such a creature could be an ebborian brain, or at least that its conscious experiences could be implemented on an ebborian brain. (For the rest of this post, I will refer to the blob of matter in which the homogeneous pleasure is experienced as an ‘ebborian brain’ for convenience; apologies if my use of the term is slightly inappropriate, the main point I’m trying to convey is that it’s a kind of conscious analogue computer whose simple structure could be duplicated without affecting the way in which information flows through it. In reality, such a ‘brain’ wouldn’t necessarily need to be 2 dimensional.)
The effect of doubling its utility function would then amount to doubling the intensity of some analogue signal propagating through a particular area of the ebborian brain where the pleasure was experienced, for example electrical current. This could be achieved by multiplying the dimension orthogonal to those within which information propagated to obtain an ebborian brain with double the mass. The ebborian brain would not be aware of itself being sliced and partitioned into two smaller ebborian brains of the original dimensions along this plane, as no information propagates through it. This would produce two ebborian brains, and because the mind running on them would not notice that it had been instantiated on two separate substrates, it would remain a single mind. I claim that its conscious experience would be no more intense, or pleasurable, than it would be if it were running on a single brain, although I am not sure of this.
One argument for this is that it seems clear that the capacity of the (e.g. human) brain to process information in an abstract way (i.e. not dependent on things like scale) is one of the factors, if not the key factor, which differentiates it from other parts of the body, and it is also the only one which seems to know that it is conscious. It therefore seems likely that if a brain were doubled in size, along with each of the subatomic particles inside each atom inside each molecule in each of its neurones, its consciousness would not itself double. Given this, it seems likely that the ‘thickening/extrusion’ process would not change the conscious experience of the mind running on each slice of the ebborian brain.
This implies that multiple wireheaded entities would have no (or only a little) more conscious experience than a single one, and this may not even depend on the proportion of worlds in which one exists (since these entities cannot see the world in which they exist and differentiate it from others) . It therefore makes little sense to convert any particular mind into a ‘monolithic’ one through wireheading (unless doing so would allow it to retain the other intricacies of its conscious experience), as this would only increase the number of such entities in existence by one, which has been established by the above argument not to increase the total pleasure in the universe, while also effectively deleting the original mind.