A very nice post. Perhaps you might also discuss Felipe De Brigard's "Inverted Experience Machine Argument" http://www.unc.edu/~brigard/Xmach.pdf To what extent does our response to Nozick's Experience Machine Argument typically reflect status quo bias rather than a desire to connect with ultimate reality?

If we really do want to "stay in touch" with reality, then we can't wirehead or plug into an "Experience Machine". But this constraint does not rule out radical superhappiness. By genetically recalibrating the hedonic treadmill, we could in principle enjoy rich, intelligent, complex lives based on information-sensitive gradients of bliss - eventually, perhaps, intelligent bliss orders of magnitude richer than anything physiologically accessible today. Optionally, genetic recalibration of our hedonic set-points could in principle leave much if not all of our existing preference architecture intact - defanging Nozick's Experience Machine Argument - while immensely enriching our quality of life. Radical hedonic recalibration is also easier than, say, the idealised logical reconciliation of Coherent Extrapolated Volition because hedonic recalibration doesn't entail choosing between mutually inconsistent values - unless of course one's values are bound up with the inflicting or undergoing suffering.

IMO one big complication with discussions of "wireheading" is that our understanding of intracranial self-stimulation has changed since Olds and Milner discovered the "pleasure centres". Taking a mu opioid agonist like heroin is in some ways the opposite of wireheading because heroin induces pure bliss without desire (shades of Buddhist nirvana?), whereas intracranial self-stimulation of the mesolimbic dopamine system involves a frenzy of anticipation rather than pure happiness. So it's often convenient to think of mu opioid agonists as mediating "liking" and dopamine agonists as mediating "wanting". We have two ultimate cubic centimetre sized "hedonic hotspots" in the rostral shell of the nucleus accumbens and ventral pallidum http://www.lsa.umich.edu/psych/research%26labs/berridge/publications/Berridge%202003%20Brain%20%26%20Cog%20Pleasures%20of%20brain.pdf where mu opioid agonists play a critical signalling role. But anatomical location is critical. Thus the mu opioid agonist remifentanil actually induces dysphoria http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18801832 - the opposite of what one might naively suppose.