Not for the Sake of Pleasure Alone

36 lukeprog 11 June 2011 11:21PM

Related: Not for the Sake of Happiness (Alone), Value is Fragile, Fake Fake Utility Functions, You cannot be mistaken about (not) wanting to wirehead, Utilons vs. Hedons, Are wireheads happy?

When someone tells me that all human action is motivated by the desire for pleasure, or that we can solve the Friendly AI problem by programming a machine superintelligence to maximize pleasure, I use a two-step argument to persuade them that things are more complicated than that.

First, I present them with a variation on Nozick's experience machine,1 something like this:

Suppose that an advanced team of neuroscientists and computer scientists could hook your brain up to a machine that gave you maximal, beyond-orgasmic pleasure for the rest of an abnormally long life. Then they will blast you and the pleasure machine into deep space at near light-speed so that you could never be interfered with. Would you let them do this for you?

Most people say they wouldn't choose the pleasure machine. They begin to realize that even though they usually experience pleasure when they get what they desired, they want more than just pleasure. They also want to visit Costa Rica and have good sex and help their loved ones succeed.

But we can be mistaken when inferring our desires from such intuitions, so I follow this up with some neuroscience.

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Inferring Our Desires

37 lukeprog 24 May 2011 05:33AM

Related: Cached Selves, The Neuroscience of Desire

You don't know your own mind.
    - Jonathan Swift, Polite Conversation

Researchers showed subjects two female faces for a few seconds and asked which face was more attractive. Researchers then placed the photos face down and handed subjects the face they had chosen, asking them to explain the motives behind their choice. But sometimes, researchers used a sleight-of-hand trick to switch the photos, showing viewers the face they had not chosen. Very few subjects noticed the face they were given was not the one they had chosen. Moreover, they happily explained why they preferred the face they had actually rejected, inventing reasons like "I like her smile" even though they had actually chosen the solemn-faced picture.1

The idea that we lack good introspective access to our own desires - that we often have no idea what we want2 - is a key lemma in naturalistic metaethics, so it seems worth a post to collect the science by which we know that.

Early warnings came from split-brain research, which identified an 'interpreter' in the left hemisphere that invents reasons for beliefs and actions. When the command 'walk' was flashed to split-brain subjects' right hemispheres, they got up from their chairs and start walking away. When asked why they suddenly started walking away, they replied (for example) that they got up because they wanted a Coke.3

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The Neuroscience of Desire

54 lukeprog 09 April 2011 07:08PM

Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to do? How can you be sure about something like that? Isn’t it all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex? How do you know whether something is really what you want to do or just some kind of nerve impulse in the brain? Some minor little activity takes place somewhere in this unimportant place in one of the brain hemispheres and suddenly I want to go to Montana or I don’t want to go to Montana.

- Don DeLillo, White Noise

Winning at life means achieving your goals  that is, satisfying your desires. As such, it will help to understand how our desires work. (I was tempted to title this article The Hidden Complexity of Wishes: Science Edition!)

Previously, I introduced readers to the neuroscience of emotion (affective neuroscience), and explained that the reward system in the brain has three major components: liking, wanting, and learning. That post discussed 'liking' or pleasure. Today we discuss 'wanting' or desire.

 

The birth of neuroeconomics

Much work has been done on the affective neuroscience of desire,1 but I am less interested with desire as an emotion than I am with desire as a cause of decisions under uncertainty. This latter aspect of desire is mostly studied by neuroeconomics,2 not affective neuroscience.

From about 1880-1960, neoclassical economics proposed simple, axiomatic models of human choice-making focused on the idea that agents make rational decisions aimed at maximizing expected utility. In the 1950s and 60s, however, economists discovered some paradoxes of human behavior that violated the axioms of these models.3 In the 70s and 80s, psychology launched an even broader attack on these models. For example, while economists assumed that choices among objects should not depend on how they are described ('descriptive invariance'), psychologists discovered powerful framing effects.4

In response, the field of behavioral economics began to offer models of human choice-making that fit the experimental data better than simple models of neoclassical economics did.Behavioral economists often proposed models that could be thought of as information-processing algorithms, so neuroscientists began looking for evidence of these algorithms in the human brain, and neuroeconomics was born.

(Warning: the rest of this post assumes some familiarity with microeconomics.)

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Value is Fragile

41 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 January 2009 08:46AM

Followup toThe Fun Theory Sequence, Fake Fake Utility Functions, Joy in the Merely Good, The Hidden Complexity of WishesThe Gift We Give To Tomorrow, No Universally Compelling Arguments, Anthropomorphic Optimism, Magical Categories, ...

If I had to pick a single statement that relies on more Overcoming Bias content I've written than any other, that statement would be:

Any Future not shaped by a goal system with detailed reliable inheritance from human morals and metamorals, will contain almost nothing of worth.

"Well," says the one, "maybe according to your provincial human values, you wouldn't like it.  But I can easily imagine a galactic civilization full of agents who are nothing like you, yet find great value and interest in their own goals.  And that's fine by me.  I'm not so bigoted as you are.  Let the Future go its own way, without trying to bind it forever to the laughably primitive prejudices of a pack of four-limbed Squishy Things -"

My friend, I have no problem with the thought of a galactic civilization vastly unlike our own... full of strange beings who look nothing like me even in their own imaginations... pursuing pleasures and experiences I can't begin to empathize with... trading in a marketplace of unimaginable goods... allying to pursue incomprehensible objectives... people whose life-stories I could never understand.

That's what the Future looks like if things go right.

If the chain of inheritance from human (meta)morals is broken, the Future does not look like this.  It does not end up magically, delightfully incomprehensible.

With very high probability, it ends up looking dull.  Pointless.  Something whose loss you wouldn't mourn.

Seeing this as obvious, is what requires that immense amount of background explanation.

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The Hidden Complexity of Wishes

58 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 November 2007 12:12AM

Followup toThe Tragedy of Group Selectionism, Fake Optimization Criteria, Terminal Values and Instrumental Values, Artificial Addition, Leaky Generalizations 

"I wish to live in the locations of my choice, in a physically healthy, uninjured, and apparently normal version of my current body containing my current mental state, a body which will heal from all injuries at a rate three sigmas faster than the average given the medical technology available to me, and which will be protected from any diseases, injuries or illnesses causing disability, pain, or degraded functionality or any sense, organ, or bodily function for more than ten days consecutively or fifteen days in any year..."
            -- The Open-Source Wish Project, Wish For Immortality 1.1

There are three kinds of genies:  Genies to whom you can safely say "I wish for you to do what I should wish for"; genies for which no wish is safe; and genies that aren't very powerful or intelligent.

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Thou Art Godshatter

68 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 13 November 2007 07:38PM

Followup toAn Alien God, Adaptation-Executers not Fitness-Maximizers, Evolutionary Psychology

Before the 20th century, not a single human being had an explicit concept of "inclusive genetic fitness", the sole and absolute obsession of the blind idiot god.  We have no instinctive revulsion of condoms or oral sex.  Our brains, those supreme reproductive organs, don't perform a check for reproductive efficacy before granting us sexual pleasure.

Why not?  Why aren't we consciously obsessed with inclusive genetic fitness?  Why did the Evolution-of-Humans Fairy create brains that would invent condoms?  "It would have been so easy," thinks the human, who can design new complex systems in an afternoon.

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