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Natural wireheadings: formal request.
This post is a formal request for everybody in this forum, who are the most likely humans to produce an FAI in the future, that in the possible resulting utopia some activity will still be available, even if they are not based on challenges of increasing complexity. I call these activity natural wireheadings, and since it is my right to determine my own fun-generating activities, I hereby formally request that some simple pleasure, listened below, will still be available at *any* point in my future cone, and that I will consider a dystopia any future which deprives me of these natural wireheadings (if anyone is still around caring for those things).
A (non-exhaustive) list of them includes the following:
- sex
- eating food/drinking
- feeling relieved for having emptied my bowels
- dancing
- the pleasure of physical activity (wood-carving, sculpting, running, etc)
- the rapture I feel when in the presence of a safe ancestral environment
- social laughter
- the pleasure of talking in a small, same-minded crowd
- listening to pop/metal/rap music
- the pleasure of resting when tired
- scratching an itch
-...
More will come!
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Comments (63)
I think any FAI-generated [e]utopia worth calling one would have to allow safe self-modification abilities and the right to choose one's own fun, so you have little to worry about in this respect. Though if things go well, there'll be forms of fun available to us (both wireheady/sensory and externally-motivated fun) that are orders of magnitude better than any you can imagine now; I support your right to scratch as many itches and listen to as much recent popular music as you want indefinitely into the future, and any FAI should as well, but you probably won't actually keep wanting to do all of these for very long.
I think the future will be more complex than that. The fact that unbounded fun will be available to me points to the hypothesis that at some moment a revolutionary modification of our body-mind structure will be necessary.
The original post was stating clearly that I could possibly will. And to please not encode your skepticism into an AI :)
Nothing worse than a scratching you can't make itch.
You seem to be confusing terminal and instrumental values.
Do you really value "scratching an itch" in itself, such that you would be saddened if that activity was not available to you anymore? What if you gain a cybernetic body that doesn't itch anymore, but its splines need the occasional reticulating, which feels even better than an itch?
It would not be a stretch to say he just has parochial terminal values. I think the gets the difference but either has weird preferences or has failed at introspection.
What if then another AI offers you to disregard the perfectible cybernetic body and live in a simulation in which there's just an enormous single pleasure available to you 24/7? If you disregard "parochial" values, in wedrifid terminology, what prevents you to collapse into an orgasmium? The point was not only that I value the pleasure coming from those activities, but that I value those activities as well.
False dichotomy.
Please elaborate?
You can value other things than actions themselves and the pleasure they bring. Maybe you like choosing and planning and acting. Maybe you like solving complex problems. Maybe you like variety (laughter and food and discovery and music, rather than the best out of four) and complexity. Maybe you like growing and learning. Maybe you like creating things. Maybe you like overcoming obstacles. Maybe you like exchanging ideas with other minds and bulding relationships and helping. Maybe you like intricate webs of feelings that aren't all pleasant but are made more enjoyable because they're bittersweet or frightening or weird.
So you'll select activities that maximize that and your zillion other values, not just activities that maximize pleasure. But there's no particular reason why current activities should be optimal. The pleasure of scratching an itch is unique, and somewhat complex. I wouldn't trade it for, say, a more intense copy of the pleasure of eating a potato chip - I already have that one. But I would trade it for a different, more intense, more complex pleasure.
Which is my thesis: outside of denying change, the only two dimension under which is significant to find an improvement are intensity and complexity. However your position appears to me not to be reflectively consistent: after all, you could consider the complexity and intensity of your whole human experience and be seduced by a different, more complex, more intense type of existence.
As I parse it, yes! It'd have to be done by gradual change (I don't want to die and be replaced by someone cooler), but yeah, that's what I want. Where am I inconsistent?
Thank Aumann, we agree! I said it was inconsistent not to be seduced by the cooler existence :)
Hmm, don't we disagree about connotations? You seem to think "orgasmium" covers that kind of being that has varied, complex, intense fun, and does things instead of just feeling like it does them. Do you?
No I don't. My reply to muflax was not related from this one. I don't have a name for this state of affair, it doesn't even seem to have an official name. Cooler existence is ok for me
This is what I was trying to convey, that you aren't confusing terminal with instrumental - you just have vastly different weights on certain poo related terminal goals. Which is a coherent state of preferences to have.
Note, however, that rejecting the non-dystopic necessity of faeces disposal pleasure does not lead us in the direction of orgasmium. Like MixedNuts obsrved there are many things that I value that are nothing to do with pleasure. Orgasms aren't even at the top of the list.
Yes, of course. I was specifically refering to the way muflax put it, see my reply to MixedNuts. It's amusing however that you anchored faeces instead of say sex or social laughter :)
I chose the terminal value that I do not share. If I thought 'lack of sex' was a lame thing to declare dystopic then I would have focussed on that. As it happens, though, I like sex a lot more than poo.
I want my future self to share my values. It is the content of some of your declared terminal values in particular and the degree with which you declare them vital which I don't share. In fact sex and social laughter are perhaps the only two items that don't look like they are deliberately selected to be limiting.
I'm curious about that. In what eutopian sense sex is better than poo?
Why are you confused about that? You wrote a whole post on your arbitrary preferences! I arbitrarily prefer one of them to another. That one of them is sex and one of them bowel movement should make the causal factors behind my preferences fairly unsurprising.
Because in the sentence that I quoted a comment above I thought I recognized that you were making a more general statement than uttering a personal preference. You attached the qualifier 'limiting' to my other preferences, so I thought there was a general, independent-from-you side that you were pointing at. Was I wrong?
Not independent from arbitrary subjective preferences. Although there are certain trends and associations one can observe in the preferences of others. One could reasonably imagine something of a spectrum on how 'core' people consider certain traits to their identity, ranging from positive social connections on one side down to digestive details on the other. You present rather a lot from lower down on that spectrum. Things that many would not consider the lack of to constitute a dystopia.
Forgive me if I appear dense to you, because I'm more and more confused. You write about subjective preferences and then about a continuum with positive social connection on one side and digestive detail to the other. May I ask you of what parameter this is a continuum of? Maybe the "what would you loose first if you were forced to?"-asked-to-core-people parameter?
Plenty of people enjoy those things, so CEV will most likely preserve them if it's implemented.
Just so long as it doesn't force them on me. I don't care if MrMind likes emptying his bowels but I for one don't want to be relying on bowels at all. In my judgement Mr is trying to hang on to the past just a little too strongly - and he can keep his shit habit for himself so long as I don't get stuck with it.
I agree with you completely. Hopefully, CEV will be at least as unlikely to compel you and I to have bowels as it will be to compel MrMind not to have any.
Well, the item directly above that was to enjoy "food/drinking" and stuff's got to go somewhere afterwards...
[Barring entirely virtual food, of course]
Virtual food would obviously be possible in a post-FAI world, and I don't see any reason why most people would bother with non-virtual food if they could get the same experience (probably even the apparent experience of putting physical food into one's mouth and tasting and chewing and swallowing it and feeling satisfied) for free, in unlimited quantities, and in varieties not limited by regional or seasonal availability.
Though even if we entirely replace our bodies with better-designed ones that don't need actual food as fuel, I'm sure there could be VR simulations of the experience of emptying one's bowels, if anyone really misses it by that point...
In Second Life, many people use custom tools that trigger a virtual pregnancy from cybersex. At least one brand advertises realistic probabilities of conception, including variation on a monthly cycle. This suggests that some people may want to eat food that makes them poop, even if non-poop-causing food already exists (and is even the default).
Second Life being what it is, that probably has a lot more to do with proclivities unrelated to any of pregnancy's usual associations than with a general desire to keep meat-phase life's default inconveniences around. I'd expect the same for virtual defecation, and for most similar features.
I'm confused; do you want at least one of these or all of them?
It appears from the discussion so far that there are two points of stability in the fun-space of the mind. If you disregard natural wireheading and their sources, and your preferences goes to pleasure per se, then there's no reason not to be driven toward an entity powered by a single source of extreme pleasure and increasingly complex challenges (if you don't want to collapse into orgasmium, that is). That shouldn't be too hard to formalize