Why would you side with the conscious mind? Do you have a specific reason for this, besides "because it's the one that holds the power" (which is perfectly acceptable, just not what I'd do in this case)?
I am not siding with it, I am it. When it holds the power, there is nothing besides it to communicate with you in this dialog.
As a data point, I personally reject it. Regardless of whether wireheading is actually a good idea, I don't care about staying in control. I also don't see my conscious mind as being particularly involved in decision making or value considerations (except as a guiding force on an instrumental level) and I see no reason to change that.
Good point. The choice of words unconscious/conscious was probably not the best one. Not all parts of the latter process feel conscious, and the former can be involved in conscious activities, e.g. use of language. I should have rather said short term or long term, or have stuck with the standard near/far, although I am not sure whether the meanings precisely overlap.
Buddhism, experiences with drugs, meditations: That may be the core reason for disagreement. Not only experiences can change preferences - inferential gap of sorts, but not one likely to be overcome by rational argument - but reactions to specific experiences differ. Some people hate certain drugs after the first use, others love them.
Buddhism, as far as I know, is certainly a powerful philosophy whose values and practices (meditation, introspection, nirvana) are more compatible with wireheading than most of the western tradition. It is also very alien to me.
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?