The fact that it can't handle advanced neuroscience is unfortunate, but it worked really well in the Savannah.
What do you mean it can't handle advanced neuroscience? Who do you think invented neuroscience!
One of the points I was trying to make was that humans can, in principle, separate out the two concepts, if they couldn't then we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
Since we can separate these concepts, it seems like our final reflective equilibrium, whatever that looks like is perfectly capable of treating them differently. I think that wire-heading is a mistake that arose from the earlier mistake of failing to preserve use-mention distinction. Defending one mistake once we have already overcome its source is like trying to defend the content of Leviticus after admitting that God doesn't exist.
I'm sorry if I made the impression that I just discard your opinion as confused.
I didn't actually think you were ignoring my opinion, I was just using a little bit of hyperbole, because people saying "I see no evidence" when there clearly is some evidence is a pet peeve of mine.
On the other hand, assuming (unconscious) signalling
This point interests me. Lets look a little deeper into this signalling hypothesis. Am I correct that you are claiming that while my concious mind utters sentences like "I don't want to be a wire-head" subconsciously I actually do want to be a wire-head?
If this is the case, then the situation we have is two separate mental agents with conflicting preferences, you appear to be siding with Subconscious!Ben rather than Conscious!Ben on the grounds that he is the 'real Ben'.
But in what sense is he more real, both of them exist as shown by their causal effect on the world? I may be biased on this issue but I would suggest you side with Conscious!Ben, he is the one with Qualia after all.
Do you, in all honesty, want to be wire-headed? For the moment I'm not asking what you think you should want, what you want to want or what you think you would want in reflective equilibrium, just what you actually want. Does the prospect of being reduced to orgasmium, if you were offered it right now, seem more desirable than the prospect of a complicated universe filled with diverse being pursuing interesting goals and having fun?
What do you mean it can't handle advanced neuroscience? Who do you think invented neuroscience!
Not that I wanna beat a dead horse here, but it took us ages. We can't even do basic arithmetic right without tons of tools. I'm always astonished to read history books and see how many really fundamental things weren't discovered for hundreds, if not thousands of years. So I'm fairly underwhelmed by the intellectual capacities of humans. But I see your point.
...Since we can separate these concepts, it seems like our final reflective equilibrium, whatever that
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?