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Unless I missed something, the little I had to read about Critch's unpublished work on hedonic awareness seemed to be a rephrasing of Skinner's Operant Conditioning/Reinforcement theory?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