Now into the more speculative realm. I would guess that retaining at least some control should be strongly prioritised over any amount of pleasure on the level of the conscious system, and that this may even be a human universal.
(I'm not fully convinced of the conscious/unconscious split you outline, but let's go with it for the sake of the argument. It's certainly a reasonable hypothesis.)
Why would you side with the conscious mind? Do you have a specific reason for this, besides "because it's the one that holds the power" (which is perfectly acceptable, just not what I'd do in this case)?
As a data point, I personally reject it. Regardless of whether wireheading is actually a good idea, I don't care about staying in control. I also don't see my conscious mind as being particularly involved in decision making or value considerations (except as a guiding force on an instrumental level) and I see no reason to change that.
I'm generalizing fairly sloppily now, but I'd expect this to be a fairly widespread Buddhist attitude, for example (and that's also my background, though I wouldn't identify with it anymore).
My most obvious objection to wireheading was, "it might be awesome, but I might miss something and end up in a local maximum instead of a global one", not "it's gonna enslave me". I'm perfectly aware that, if wireheaded, I'd have little conscious control left, if any. That does not bother me in the least. Caring that much about control is a perspective I did not anticipate and it does help explain the problem.
But even if it were not true, well, some people move abroad leaving their families and friends and jobs behind, others can't imagine that. Does it break the psychological unity of humanity? There were people who didn't leave their country even if it was the only real chance to save their lives. Why do you expect that we will all agree on a hypothetical whose role in our evolution is non-existent and which belongs to the class of things which we consistently can't reason well about, when we differ in more mundane (and therefore evolutionary salient) decisions?
Point taken. I thought wireheading was a simple, easy-to-understand and realistic scenario. That doesn't seem to be the case at all. Taken as a more complicated thought experiment, the rejection and varying intuitions do make sense.
This gets even clearer when I look at this framing:
Wireheading was traditionally described as total dictatorship of the unconscious mind, and is therefore rejected whenever the conscious mind is under control.
That's pretty much the opposite way of how I'd describe it, even though it's factually totally fine. The metaphor that I was thinking of the first time I saw wireheading described was liberation and freedom from suffering, not dictatorship!
Also, when evaluating it, I was falling back on "wireheady" experiences I already had, like states of high absorption or equanimity in meditation, use of particular drugs (very limited, for health reasons, but never regretted, nor was addiction ever an issue), very intense (semi-)lucid dreams and so on. So I classified wireheading always as "totally doable and somewhat familiar", not "who knows what will happen?". I assumed that anyone thinking seriously about it would have comparable experiences to rely on; maybe that's not so.
Maybe this very different perspective explains the intuitions, but I'm not sure it helps me form an opinion on actual wireheading.
Why would you side with the conscious mind? Do you have a specific reason for this, besides "because it's the one that holds the power" (which is perfectly acceptable, just not what I'd do in this case)?
I am not siding with it, I am it. When it holds the power, there is nothing besides it to communicate with you in this dialog.
...As a data point, I personally reject it. Regardless of whether wireheading is actually a good idea, I don't care about staying in control. I also don't see my conscious mind as being particularly involved in decision m
I've been thinking about wireheading and the nature of my values. Many people here have defended the importance of external referents or complex desires. My problem is, I can't understand these claims at all.
To clarify, I mean wireheading in the strict "collapsing into orgasmium" sense. A successful implementation would identify all the reward circuitry and directly stimulate it, or do something equivalent. It would essentially be a vastly improved heroin. A good argument for either keeping complex values (e.g. by requiring at least a personal matrix) or external referents (e.g. by showing that a simulation can never suffice) would work for me.
Also, I use "reward" as short-hand for any enjoyable feeling, as "pleasure" tends to be used for a specific one of them, among bliss, excitement and so on, and "it's not about feeling X, but X and Y" is still wireheading after all.
I tried collecting all related arguments I could find. (Roughly sorted from weak to very weak, as I understand them, plus link to example instances. I also searched any literature/other sites I could think of, but didn't find other (not blatantly incoherent) arguments.)
(There have also been technical arguments against specific implementations of wireheading. I'm not concerned with those, as long as they don't show impossibility.)
Overall, none of this sounds remotely plausible to me. Most of it is outright question-begging or relies on intuition pumps that don't even work for me.
It confuses me that others might be convinced by arguments of this sort, so it seems likely that I have a fundamental misunderstanding or there are implicit assumptions I don't see. I fear that I have a large inferential gap here, so please be explicit and assume I'm a Martian. I genuinely feel like Gamma in A Much Better Life.
To me, all this talk about "valueing something" sounds like someone talking about "feeling the presence of the Holy Ghost". I don't mean this in a derogatory way, but the pattern "sense something funny, therefore some very specific and otherwise unsupported claim" matches. How do you know it's not just, you know, indigestion?
What is this "valuing"? How do you know that something is a "value", terminal or not? How do you know what it's about? How would you know if you were mistaken? What about unconscious hypocrisy or confabulation? Where do these "values" come from (i.e. what process creates them)? Overall, it sounds to me like people are confusing their feelings about (predicted) states of the world with caring about states directly.
To me, it seems like it's all about anticipating and achieving rewards (and avoiding punishments, but for the sake of the wireheading argument, it's equivalent). I make predicitions about what actions will trigger rewards (or instrumentally help me pursue those actions) and then engage in them. If my prediction was wrong, I drop the activity and try something else. If I "wanted" something, but getting it didn't trigger a rewarding feeling, I wouldn't take that as evidence that I "value" the activity for its own sake. I'd assume I suck at predicting or was ripped off.
Can someone give a reason why wireheading would be bad?