Previously in series:  Harmful Options

An iota of fictional evidence from The Golden Age by John C. Wright:

    Helion had leaned and said, "Son, once you go in there, the full powers and total command structures of the Rhadamanth Sophotech will be at your command.  You will be invested with godlike powers; but you will still have the passions and distempers of a merely human spirit.  There are two temptations which will threaten you.  First, you will be tempted to remove your human weaknesses by abrupt mental surgery.  The Invariants do this, and to a lesser degree, so do the White Manorials, abandoning humanity to escape from pain.  Second, you will be tempted to indulge your human weakness.  The Cacophiles do this, and to a lesser degree, so do the Black Manorials.  Our society will gladly feed every sin and vice and impulse you might have; and then stand by helplessly and watch as you destroy yourself; because the first law of the Golden Oecumene is that no peaceful activity is forbidden.  Free men may freely harm themselves, provided only that it is only themselves that they harm."
    Phaethon knew what his sire was intimating, but he did not let himself feel irritated.  Not today.  Today was the day of his majority, his emancipation; today, he could forgive even Helion's incessant, nagging fears.
    Phaethon also knew that most Rhadamanthines were not permitted to face the Noetic tests until they were octogenerians; most did not pass on their first attempt, or even their second.  Many folk were not trusted with the full powers of an adult until they reached their Centennial.  Helion, despite criticism from the other Silver-Gray branches, was permitting Phaethon to face the tests five years early...

Previously in series:  Living By Your Own Strength

Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice—which I haven't read, though I've read some of the research behind it—talks about how offering people more choices can make them less happy.

A simple intuition says this shouldn't ought to happen to rational agents:  If your current choice is X, and you're offered an alternative Y that's worse than X, and you know it, you can always just go on doing X.  So a rational agent shouldn't do worse by having more options.  The more available actions you have, the more powerful you become—that's how it should ought to work.

For example, if an ideal rational agent is initially forced to take only box B in Newcomb's Problem, and is then offered the additional choice of taking both boxes A and B, the rational agent shouldn't regret having more options.  Such regret indicates that you're "fighting your own ritual of cognition" which helplessly selects the worse choice once it's offered you.

But this intuition only governs extremely idealized rationalists, or rationalists in extremely idealized situations.  Bounded rationalists can easily do worse with strictly more options, because they burn computing operations to evaluate them.  You could write an invincible chess program in one line of Python if its only legal move were the winning one.

Of course Schwartz and co. are not talking about anything so pure and innocent as the computing cost of having more choices.

If you're dealing, not with an ideal rationalist, not with a bounded rationalist, but with a human being—

Say, would you like to finish reading this post, or watch this surprising video instead?

Followup to:  Truly Part of You

"Myself, and Morisato-san... we want to live together by our own strength."

Jared Diamond once called agriculture "the worst mistake in the history of the human race".  Farmers could grow more wheat than hunter-gatherers could collect nuts, but the evidence seems pretty conclusive that agriculture traded quality of life for quantity of life.  One study showed that the farmers in an area were six inches shorter and seven years shorter-lived than their hunter-gatherer predecessors—even though the farmers were more numerous.

I don't know if I'd call agriculture a mistake.  But one should at least be aware of the downsides.  Policy debates should not appear one-sided.

In the same spirit—

Once upon a time, our hunter-gatherer ancestors strung their own bows, wove their own baskets, whittled their own flutes.

And part of our alienation from that environment of evolutionary adaptedness, is the number of tools we use that we don't understand and couldn't make for ourselves.

Modern day gamemakers are constantly working on higher-resolution, more realistic graphics; more immersive sounds—but they're a long long way off real life.

Pressing the "W" key to run forward as a graphic of a hungry tiger bounds behind you, just doesn't seem quite as sensual as running frantically across the savanna with your own legs, breathing in huge gasps and pumping your arms as the sun beats down on your shoulders, the grass brushes your shins, and the air whips around you with the wind of your passage.

Don't mistake me for a luddite; I'm not saying the technology can't get that good.  I'm saying it hasn't gotten that good yet.

Failing to escape the computer tiger would also have fewer long-term consequences than failing to escape a biological tiger—it would be less a part of the total story of your life—meaning you're also likely to be less emotionally involved.  But that's a topic for another post.  Today's post is just about the sensual quality of the experience.

Sensual experience isn't a question of some mysterious quality that only the "real world" possesses.  A computer screen is as real as a tiger, after all.  Whatever is, is real.

But the pattern of the pseudo-tiger, inside the computer chip, is nowhere near as complex as a biological tiger; it offers far fewer modes in which to interact.  And the sensory bandwidth between you and the computer's pseudo-world is relatively low; and the information passing along it isn't in quite the right format.

It's not a question of computer tigers being "virtual" or "simulated", and therefore somehow a separate magisterium. But with present technology, and the way your brain is presently set up, you'd have a lot more neurons involved in running away from a biological tiger.

From Greg Egan's Permutation City:

    The workshop abutted a warehouse full of table legs—one hundred and sixty-two thousand, three hundred and twenty-nine, so far.  Peer could imagine nothing more satisfying than reaching the two hundred thousand mark—although he knew it was likely that he'd change his mind and abandon the workshop before that happened; new vocations were imposed by his exoself at random intervals, but statistically, the next one was overdue.  Immediately before taking up woodwork, he'd passionately devoured all the higher mathematics texts in the central library, run all the tutorial software, and then personally contributed several important new results to group theory—untroubled by the fact that none of the Elysian mathematicians would ever be aware of his work.  Before that, he'd written over three hundred comic operas, with librettos in Italian, French and English—and staged most of them, with puppet performers and audience.  Before that, he'd patiently studied the structure and biochemistry of the human brain for sixty-seven years; towards the end he had fully grasped, to his own satisfaction, the nature of the process of consciousness.  Every one of these pursuits had been utterly engrossing, and satisfying, at the time.  He'd even been interested in the Elysians, once.
    No longer.  He preferred to think about table legs.

Among science fiction authors, (early) Greg Egan is my favorite; of early-Greg-Egan's books, Permutation City is my favorite; and this particular passage in Permutation City, more than any of the others, I find utterly horrifying.

If this were all the hope the future held, I don't know if I could bring myself to try.  Small wonder that people don't sign up for cryonics, if even SF writers think this is the best we can do.

You could think of this whole series on Fun Theory as my reply to Greg Egan—a list of the ways that his human-level uploaded civilizations Fail At Fun.  (And yes, this series will also explain what's wrong with the Culture and how to fix it.)

Followup to:  Not for the Sake of Happiness (Alone), Existential Angst Factory

There's a class of prophecy that runs:  "In the Future, machines will do all the work.  Everything will be automated.  Even labor of the sort we now consider 'intellectual', like engineering, will be done by machines.  We can sit back and own the capital.  You'll never have to lift a finger, ever again."

But then won't people be bored?

No; they can play computer games—not like our games, of course, but much more advanced and entertaining.

Yet wait!  If you buy a modern computer game, you'll find that it contains some tasks that are—there's no kind word for this—effortful.  (I would even say "difficult", with the understanding that we're talking about something that takes 10 minutes, not 10 years.)

So in the future, we'll have programs that help you play the game—taking over if you get stuck on the game, or just bored; or so that you can play games that would otherwise be too advanced for you.

But isn't there some wasted effort, here?  Why have one programmer working to make the game harder, and another programmer to working to make the game easier?  Why not just make the game easier to start with?  Since you play the game to get gold and experience points, making the game easier will let you get more gold per unit time: the game will become more fun.

So this is the ultimate end of the prophecy of technological progress—just staring at a screen that says "YOU WIN", forever.

And maybe we'll build a robot that does that, too.

Then what?

Followup to:  Joy in the Merely Good

Raise the topic of cryonics, uploading, or just medically extended lifespan/healthspan, and some bioconservative neo-Luddite is bound to ask, in portentous tones:

"But what will people do all day?"

They don't try to actually answer the question.  That is not a bioethicist's role, in the scheme of things.  They're just there to collect credit for the Deep Wisdom of asking the question.  It's enough to imply that the question is unanswerable, and therefore, we should all drop dead.

That doesn't mean it's a bad question.

It's not an easy question to answer, either.  The primary experimental result in hedonic psychology—the study of happiness—is that people don't know what makes them happy.

And there are many exciting results in this new field, which go a long way toward explaining the emptiness of classical Utopias.  But it's worth remembering that human hedonic psychology is not enough for us to consider, if we're asking whether a million-year lifespan could be worth living.

Fun Theory, then, is the field of knowledge that would deal in questions like:

• "How much fun is there in the universe?"
• "Will we ever run out of fun?"
• "Are we having fun yet?"
• "Could we be having more fun?"