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Collins comments on Not for the Sake of Pleasure Alone - Less Wrong
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Well, congratulations on realizing that “wanting” and “liking” are different. No, I don't think hedonism has anything to do (directly) with wanting.
Also, people say that they “wouldn't choose the pleasure machine” because they expect (whether correctly or not) to have some unpleasant outcomes if they answer “yes” to the proposed thought experiment (as have been noted in the comments around, yes).
Also, no, understanding humans' values [quite likely] has nothing to do with building friendly A.I. (i.e. it's a bad idea to build a powerful A.I. with human-like values).
It seems like there's a lot of confusion from the semantic side of things.
There are a lot of not-unreasonable definitions of words like "wanting", "liking", "pleasure", and the like that carve the concepts up differently and have different implications for our relationship to pleasure. If they were more precisely defined at the beginning, one might say we were discovering something about them. But it seems more helpful to say that the brain chemistry suggests a good way of defining the terms (to correlate with pleasant experience, dopamine levels, etc), at which point questions of whether we just want pleasure become straightforward.
Supposedly, there's something that a human brain (or, rather, some part of the human brain) tries to maximize (by
expected over time sumof that something, … or something :) ) (as far as it can). Probably correlated with what some people describe as “subjective feeling of pleasure” (see “phenomenal judgments”).A more interesting (and less certain) idea is: if a human considers that “some part” as own identity (“valued identity”) and all other parts of own brain as “external” (not more valued as other parts of own body), that human will seek out to be wireheaded (whether agreeing verbally to proposed thought experiments or not).