I do find your overall thought process in your first few paragraphs plausible, but "anyone who disagrees with me is just not admitting that I'm right" sounds way too much like the kind of toxic reasoning I'm trying to avoid, so I'm fairly skeptical of it.
Just in case, I don't argue that people who say they don't want to wirehead are wrong about that. I think it's ultimately inconsistent with a full appreciation that values are not externally validated. I think this full appreciation is prevent by biological stop-guards.
Something I think about in relation to wireheading, so close together in my brain that when talking about one I find myself conflating with the other, is that it should follow that if values aren't externally validated, it should be equivalent to 'make the world better' by (a) changing the world to fit our values or by (b) changing our values to fit the world. We have a strong preference for the former, but we could modify this preference so (b) would seem just as good a solution. So by modifying their value about solutions (a) and (b), a person in theory could then self-modify to be perfectly happy with the universe as it is. This is equivalent to wireheading, because in both cases you have a perfectly happy person without altering the universe outside their brain.
I think what 'anyone who disagrees with you is not admitting' is that the universe in which your values are altered to match reality (or in which a person chooses to wirehead) is just as good as any other universe.
The goodness of the universe is subjective, and for any subjective observer, the universe is good if it satisfies their preferences. Thus, a universe in which our values are modified to match the universe is just as good as our values modified to match the universe. I think that is clear.
However, people who don't want to wirehead compare the universe (b) (one in which their values are modified but the universe is not) with the universe they currently prefer -- I guess as they are supposed to -- and decide that universe (b) is not as good -- relative of course to their current set of values.
But I don't understand their preference for their original set of preferences if they know these preferences aren't actually, really, externally better. This is the contradiction I find: they insist that external reality is what matters to them, rather than happiness through wireheading. But preferring to want to prefer a set of values that have no external significance is preferring to live in a wire-headed universe, in the sense that the values of these preferences are just in their head after all.
One difference I suppose is that with respect to our preferences we're wired by biology, which for now is hard-wired, whereas choosing to wirehead for happiness would be a choice. If we want to minimize the extent that we're wired, we'd stick to a minimum set. In which case, as soon as we have the choice to shake off the yoke of biological preferences, we should self-modify ourselves into blissfully happy rocks (an inert object entirely satisfied with the way the universe currently is).
Yup, full agreement.
That's exactly how it appears to me, though I'm not confident this is correct. It seems like others should've thought of the same thing, but then they shouldn't disagree, which they do. So either this is far less convincing than I think (maybe these safeguards don't work in my case) or it's wrong. Dunno right now.
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?