DaFranker comments on Not for the Sake of Pleasure Alone - Less Wrong

36 Post author: lukeprog 11 June 2011 11:21PM

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Comment author: DaFranker 24 August 2012 02:29:02PM *  1 point [-]

You deliberately constructed this scenario so as to manipulate me into judging what the inhabitants experience as less than that, appealing to some superstitious notion of true/pure/honest/all-natural pleasure.

No. I deliberately re-used a similar construct to Wireheading theories to expose more easily that many people disagree with this.

There's no superstition of "true/pure/honest/all-natural pleasure" in my model - right now, my current brain feels extreme anti-hedons towards the idea of living in Wirehead Land. Right now, and to my best reasonable extrapolation, I and any future version of "myself" will hate and disapprove of wireheading, and would keep doing so even once wireheaded, if not for the fact that the wireheading necessarily overrides this in order to achieve maximum happiness by re-wiring the user to value wireheading and nothing else.

The "weak points" I spoke of is that you consider some "weaknesses" of your position, namely others' mental states, but those are not the weakest of your position, nor are you using the strongest "enemy" arguments to judge your own position, and the other pieces of data also indicate that there's mind-killing going on.

The quality of mental states is presumably the only thing we should care about - my model also points towards "that" (same label, probably not same referent). The thing is, that phrase is so open to interpretation (What's "should"? What's "quality"? How meta do the mental states go about analyzing themselves and future/past mental states, and does the quality of a mental state take into account the bound-to-reality factor of future qualitative mental states? etc.) that it's almost an applause light.