I would posit that divergent behaviors and approaches to the norms will still occur, despite the existence of such an oracle just for the sake of imagination, exploration, and the enjoyment of the process itself. Such oracle would also be aware of the existence of unknown future factors, and the benefits of diverse approaches to problems in the face of factors with unknown long term benefits and viability until certain processes has been executed. As you said, such an oracle would then try to explore every avenue of research, while still focusing on the ones deemed most likely to be fruitful. Such oracle should also be good on self-reflection, and able to question its own approaches and the various perspectives it is able to subsume. After all, isn't self introspection and self reflections part of how one improve themselves?

Then there's the Fun theory sequence that DSimon have posted about.

Yw and thanks for the clarification. No more confusion then. :)

The reply was about how drethelin's situation where a real situation/behaviour is repeatedly associated with imagined reward, is very similar to covert positive reinforcement where one imagines even the situation/behaviour itself. I'm confused on the relevance of mentioning the original comparison between actual/imagined reward in the context?

We have a situation where there are scientific/empirical tests performed on 'a real behaviour with real positive reinforcement' and 'an imagined behaviour with imagined positive reinforcement' that seems to support each other.

In fact covert conditioning does have the requirement that the patient imagine the situation sufficiently vividly. There's no reason to believe that if the patient imagine (or perceive) the situation too vividly (or too real) it would somehow affect them less.

Unless I missed something, the little I had to read about Critch's unpublished work on hedonic awareness seemed to be a rephrasing of Skinner's Operant Conditioning/Reinforcement theory?

As for the use of imagined positive reinforcer, that seems very similar to covert positive reinforcement (part of covert conditioning) which should be easy to find scientific tests on if you have access to libraries.

The only difference here is that the behavior itself is not imagined. I'm inclined to believe that the situations are similar enough that the tests on covert positive reinforcement could be applied. The perception of the behavior itself being real may have some effect on our perception of the imagined reinforcer, but there's not enough reason to believe it would majorly change the effect of the imagined reinforcer on average.