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

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (129)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: chaosmosis 24 August 2012 10:30:31PM 0 points [-]

I think I understand what koning_robot was going for here, but I can't approach it except through a description. This description elicits a very real moral and emotional reaction within me, but I can't describe or pin down what exactly is wrong with it. Despite that, I still don't like it.

So, some of the dystopian Fun Worlds that I imagine are rooms where non AI lifeforms have no intelligence of their own anymore, as it was not needed. These lifeforms are incredibly simple and are little more than dopamine receptors (I'm not up to date on the neuroscience of pleasure, I remember its not really dopamine but am not sure what the chemical(s) that correspond to happiness are). The lifeforms are all identical and interchangeable. They do not sing or dance. Yet they are extremely happy, in a chemical sort of sense. Still, I would not like to be one.

Values are worth acting on, even if we don't understand them exactly, so long as we understand in a general sense what they tell us. That future would suck horribly and I don't want it to happen.