There's a recent science fiction story that I can't recall the name of, in which the narrator is traveling somewhere via plane, and the security check includes a brain scan for deviance. The narrator is a pedophile. Everyone who sees the results of the scan is horrified--not that he's a pedophile, but that his particular brain abnormality is easily fixed, so that means he's chosen to remain a pedophile. He's closely monitored, so he'll never be able to act on those desires, but he keeps them anyway, because that's part of who he is.
What would you do in his place?
In the language of good old-fashioned AI, his pedophilia is a goal or a terminal value. "Fixing" him means changing or erasing that value. People here sometimes say that a rational agent should never change its terminal values. (If one goal is unobtainable, the agent will simply not pursue that goal.) Why, then, can we imagine the man being tempted to do so? Would it be a failure of rationality?
If the answer is that one terminal value can rationally set a goal to change another terminal value, then either
- any terminal value of a rational agent can change, or
- we need another word for the really terminal values that can't be changed rationally, and a way of identifying them, and a proof that they exist.
I'm not sure that's a good place to start here. The value of sex is at least more terminal than the value of sex according to your orientation, and the value of pleasure is at least more terminal than sex.
The question is indeed one about identity. It's clear that our transhumans, as traditionally notioned, don't really exclusively value things so basic as euphoria, if indeed our notion is anything but a set of agents who all self-modify to identical copies of the happiest agent possible.
We have of course transplanted our own humanity onto transhumanity. If given self-modification routines, we'd certainly be saying annoying things like, "Well, I value my own happiness, persistent through self-modification, but only if its really me on the other side of the self-modification." To which the accompanying AI facepalms and offers a list of exactly zero self-modification options that fit that criterion.
Well, as I said initially, I prefer to toss out all this "terminal value" stuff and just say that we have various values that depend on each other in various ways, but am willing to treat "terminal value" as an approximate term. So the possibility that X's valuation of sex with children actually depends on other things (e.g. his valuation of pleasure) doesn't seem at all problematic to me.
That said, if you'd rather start somewhere else, that's OK with me. On your account, when we say X is a pedophile, what do we mean? This whole example... (read more)