Hacker News Reader

"Are there any wireheading proponents in this crowd?"

I have never heard the term and this is my first introduction to the concept, at least framed in this manner ...

But ... aren't we all, already, "wireheads" ? Our tools and heuristics might be a little blunt, or ineffectual, but the quote you provide:

"Their primary state of consciousness cycles over a period of 24 hours. Here is their routine: They wake up and experience intense zest for life and work at full capacity making others happy and having fun. Then they go crazy creative in the afternoon, usually spending that time alone or with friends, and explore (and share) strange but always awesome psychedelic-like states of consciousness. Finally, at night they just relax to the max (the healthy and genetically encoded phenomenological equivalent of shooting heroin)."

... sounds a lot like the better days that I have - it's just that I accomplish it with Caffeine, meditation, intense exercise, good sleep hygiene and (sometimes) alcohol.

While I haven't formally explored my day to day life on a happiness maximization metric, I did not come to these tools accidently, or randomly - I've slowly tailored them, and my own habits, to achieve maximum happiness on a specific time horizon ...

Good point, thank you!

It's an interesting thing, because I also take caffeine, and exercise, and meditate. Maybe it's just a matter of degrees, a sliding scale. But "too much of a good thing" isn't unheard of, and I have a strong suspicion that "pleasure control" is one of those things that's tolerable in small doses, but ultimately isn't conducive to survival or satisfaction, especially taken to the extreme of avoiding negative emotions entirely.

Good points. FWIW, I took the article to assume a sort of post-human lifestyle/environment in which physical needs (food, safety, etc.) are met. E.g. "In principle the whole economy may eventually be entirely based on exploring the state-space of consciousness and trading information about the most valuable contents discovered doing so." I.e., all problems are solved except hedonism.

That makes sense, thanks. I was definitely thinking in a nearer-term context.

Even in that distant future though, wireheading would be a practice that fundamentally damages the emotional feedback loops that led to that type of society being formed in the first place. (i.e. the feedback loops that cause people in a society to reject agents that want to change or destroy it.)

Without those feedback loops, a perfect utopia would become an unstable equilibrium, because nobody has any reason to prefer that society over any other society. Thus, you could argue that wireheading is long-term incompatible with a perfect utopia.

There is an "out", which is to just have some of the population wirehead, and then have the society be steered by the individuals that don't wirehead, and therefore can make ethical decisions. Alternatively, you could emulate Ian Bank's Culture, and remove decisionmaking power from human hands entirely via automation. But really, even in that world, I'd rather be one of the un-wireheaders who retained their ethical agency, even if it came with suffering. At least, I think I would... although I'm not sure exactly why.

> With utilitarianism, we attempt to maximize pleasure (very roughly speaking). But part of that is because pleasure has been tied to good events by our built-in wiring. If we have the ability to make any event pleasurable, it feels like we need a new ethical system that employs a full gradient of emotions, including low-valence ones, to appropriately reflect the difference between the desired and the actual reality, and avoid a dystopia where everyone is happy. How does wireheading take this into account

TFA is entirely about addressing this. Wireheading is a common argument against utilitarianism. Furthermore, if everyone is happy, is it a dystopia?

If someone steals my wallet, and it doesn't make me unhappy, then am I really hurt? Money that can't increase my happiness isn't useful

A dystopia where everyone is happy is a bit of an oxymoron. I can imagine this "dystopia" being unsustainable though. Like everyone is happy but forgets to eat or has no motivation to reproduce or everyone is happy but they are quickly killing the planet (still better than our current state, lol). But I think the article deals with the unsustainability.