Are you looking for a definition?
No, I'm trying to understand the process others use to make their claims about what they value (besides direct experiences). I can't reproduce it, so it feels like they are confabulating, but I don't assume that's the most likely answer here.
For our purposes, we can get some pretty decent bayesian evidence on what our values are by simply asking "which future scenario do I want to steer the world towards?" Is that going to give us perfect information on exactly what we value? No. But is it a pretty good start? Yes.
That seems horribly broken. There are tons of biases that make asking such questions essentially meaningless. Looking at anticipated and real rewards and punishments can easily be done and fits into simple models that actually predict people's behaviors. Asking complex question leads to stuff like the Trolley problem which is notoriously unreliable and useless with regards to figuring out why we prefer some options to others.
It seems to me that assuming complex values requires cognitive algorithms that are much more expensive than anything evolution might build and don't easily fit actually revealed preferences. Their only strength seems to be that they would match some thoughts that come up while contemplating decisions (and not even non-contradictory ones). Isn't that privileging a very complex hypothesis?
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?