Unless I missed something, the little I had to read about Critch's unpublished work on hedonic awareness seemed to be a rephrasing of Skinner's Operant Conditioning/Reinforcement theory?
As for the use of imagined positive reinforcer, that seems very similar to covert positive reinforcement (part of covert conditioning) which should be easy to find scientific tests on if you have access to libraries.
The only difference here is that the behavior itself is not imagined. I'm inclined to believe that the situations are similar enough that the tests on covert positive reinforcement could be applied. The perception of the behavior itself being real may have some effect on our perception of the imagined reinforcer, but there's not enough reason to believe it would majorly change the effect of the imagined reinforcer on average.
The only difference between actual rewards and imaginary rewards is that the former isn't imaginary?
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 87. The previous thread has passed 500 comments.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: