a_parent comments on Morality as Parfitian-filtered Decision Theory? - Less Wrong

24 Post author: SilasBarta 30 August 2010 09:37PM

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Tags: evpsych morality decision_theory anthropic

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Comment author: gwern 02 September 2010 02:33:35PM 0 points [-]

Well, no, maybe you just believe remote stimulation of the pleasure centers of one's brain to be inherently addicting, whereas I just assumed that a superintelligent being hitting my brain with remote stimulation could avoid causing addiction if it was motivated to do so.

Well, I figure wireheading is either intrinsically addicting, by definition (what else could addiction be motivated by but pleasure?) or so close to it as to make little practical difference; there are a number of rat/mice studies which entail sticking electrodes into the pleasure center and gaining complete control and the researchers don't mention any mice/rat ever heroically defying the stimulus through sheer force of will, which suggests very bad things for any humans so situated.

Comment author: a_parent 02 September 2010 04:13:43PM 3 points [-]

Yvain wrote:

Only now neuroscientists are starting to recognize a difference between "reward" and "pleasure", or call it "wanting" and "liking"... A University of Michigan study analyzed the brains of rats eating a favorite food. They found separate circuits for "wanting" and "liking", and were able to knock out either circuit without affecting the other (it was actually kind of cute - they measured the number of times the rats licked their lips as a proxy for "liking", though of course they had a highly technical rationale behind it). When they knocked out the "liking" system, the rats would eat exactly as much of the food without making any of the satisifed lip-licking expression, and areas of the brain thought to be correlated with pleasure wouldn't show up in the MRI. Knock out "wanting", and the rats seem to enjoy the food as much when they get it but not be especially motivated to seek it out.

Comment author: gwern 02 September 2010 05:47:31PM 1 point [-]

That's interesting. Hadn't seen that. So you are suggesting that addiction as we know it for drugs etc. is going through the 'wanting' circuit, but wireheading would go through the 'liking' circuit, and so wouldn't resemble the former?

Comment author: a_parent 02 September 2010 11:07:21PM 0 points [-]

Yvain's post suggested it; I just stuck it in my cache.

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