+1 Karma for the human augmented search; I’ve found the Less Wrong articles on wireheading and I’m reading up on it. It seems similar to what I’m proposing, but I don’t think it’s identical.
Say, take Greg Egan’s Axiomatic, for instance. There, you have brain mods that can arbitrarily modify one’s value system; there are units for secular humanism, units for Catholicism, and perhaps, if it were legal, there would probably be units for for Nazi-ism and Fascism as well.
If you go by Aristotle and assume that happiness is the satisfaction of all goods, and assume that neural modification can result in the arbitrary creation and destruction of values and notions of what is good, what is a virtue, then we can arbitrarily induce happiness or fulfillment through neural modification to arbitrarily establish values.
I think that’s different than wireheading, wireheading is the artificial creation of hedons through electrical stimulation. Ultra-happiness is the artificial creation of utilons through value modification.
In a more limited context than what I am proposing, let’s say I like having sex while drunk and skydiving, but not while high on cocaine. Let’s take two cases, first, I am having sex while drunk and skydriving. In the second case, assume that I have been modified so that I like having sex while drunk and skydiving and high on cocaine, and that I am having sex while drunk, skydiving, and high on cocaine. Am I better off in the first situation or in the second situation?
If you accept that example, then you have three possible responses. I won’t address the possibility that I am worse off in the second example, because that assumes a negative value to modification, and for the purposes of this argument I don’t want to deal with that. The other two possible responses are, I am equally as well off in the first example as I am in the second, and that I am better off in the second example than I am in the first.
In the first case, then wouldn’t it be rational to modify my value system so that I assign as high a possible value to being as possible, and assign no value to any other states? In the second case, then wouldn’t I be better off if I were to be modified so that I would have as many instances of preference for existence as possible?
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And with that, I believe we’ve hit 500 replies. Would someone be as kind as to open the Welcome to Less Wrong 7th Thread?
I think a lot of things is because it’s Chinese. Liu Cixin (LCX) writes in an essay about how he felt that aside from the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution was the only thing that could make people lose complete hope in humanity.
For the criticism Zvi brings up, the book is written by someone who is well-read and is familiar with history. For instance, the climatic battle wherein the massed human fleet is wiped out by a single Trisolarian attack craft? It’s been done before; Battle of Tumu in Ming history involved an inexperienced Emperor under the control of an utterly incompetent eunuch lead an army to fight the Mongols in the steppes and gets 200,000 soldiers killed within 2 weeks as they run out of food and water. There’s also a battle in the Chinese Warring States period wherein subterfuge by the enemy gets an incompetent commander put up, Zhao Kuo, who changes from a Fabian strategy to a direct attack strategy and gets 200,000 to 300,000 Zhao State soldiers wiped out by the Qin State, and unlike Rome after Cannae, Zhao never recovers.
For more non-Chinese examples, a close examination of Empire of Japan policy before World War II and during World War II betrays rampant incompetence and what really amounted to a headless chicken that didn’t know when to bide for time. Yamamato at the Battle of Midway charged in not knowing his codes were broken and utterly underestimating the Americans. Or we could point to World War I, called the First European Civil War by some leftist historians, severely weakening European civilization as a generation of young men were massacred in the trenches.
As for Wade, it’s the non-Western thing that comes to mind. When the Ming Dynasty fell, many former government officials sought not to eat grain grown in the succeeding Qing Dynasty, not because they felt their resistance would be successful, but because of a radical deontologism. What this resulted in was that once they ran through their stockpiles of food, they’d literally starve to death to protest, and I emphasize that this was a “meaningless” protest with no positive consequences, it did nothing to the new Qing Empire. You have to recall that people in the Confucian bloc, while often-times extreme consequentialists, are also insane deontologists, think General Nogi following his Emperor in death.
That is to say, I don’t find the Chinese characters flat, given how Chinese people behave. Wade is not a believable American, but he’s reasonable within a Chinese context.