That depends on the exact implementation. The paperclipper might be purely feedback-driven, essentially a paperclip-thermostat. In that case, it will simulate setting its internal variables to BB(1000), that will create huge positive feedback and it happily wireheads itself. Or it might simulate the state of the world, count the paperclips and then rate it, in which case it won't wirehead itself.
The former is incredibly stupid, an agent that consistently gets its imagination confused with reality and cannot, even in principle, separate them would be utterly incapable of abstract thought.
'Expected Paper-clips' is completely different to paper-clips. If an agent can't tell the difference between them it may as well not be able to tell houses from dogs. The fact that I can even understand the difference suggests that I am not that stupid.
I just don't see any evidence to conclude humans are like that.
Really? You can't see any Bayesian evidence at all!
How about the fact that I claim not to want to wire head? My beliefs about my desires are surely correlated with my desires. How about all the other people who agree with me, including a lot of commenters on this site and most of humanity in general? Are our beliefs so astonishingly inaccurate that we are not even a tiny bit more likely to be right than wrong?
What about the many cases of people strongly wanting things that did not make them happy and acting on those desires, or vice versa?
You are privileging the hypothesis. Your view has a low prior (most of the matter in the universe is not part of my mind, so given that I might care about anything it is not very likely that I will care about one specific lump of meat?). You don't present any evidence of your own, and yet you demand that I present mine.
The former is incredibly stupid, an agent that consistently gets its imagination confused with reality and cannot, even in principle, separate them would be utterly incapable of abstract thought.
Welcome to evolution. Have you looked at humanity lately?
(Ok, enough snide remarks. I do agree that this is fairly stupid design, but it would still work in many cases. The fact that it can't handle advanced neuroscience is unfortunate, but it worked really well in the Savannah.)
...How about the fact that I claim not to want to wire head? My beliefs about my desi
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?