Comments on: Wirehead Gods On Lotus Thrones

By: “One vision of the far future is a “wirehead society”. Our posthuman descendants achieve technological omnipotence, making every activity boring and meaningless — they just reprogram their brains to be deliriously happy all the tim

Wed, 02 Apr 2014 17:26:12 +0000

[…] by yourgayfaggot [link] […]

By: Eli

Eli — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 16:33:58 +0000

Did you have an actual point in that comment, or did you merely wish to take a bunch of cheap, snide shots at other people with whose politics you loosely imply you disagree?

Report comment

By: Eli

Eli — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 16:19:42 +0000

Well yes, of course. Hence why I immediately started adding things as soon as I’d summoned one.

Also, I actually have a somewhat more cutting point to make about the difference between wireheaders and Buddhas. According to Buddhism, Buddhas are in touch with the Truth of Reality, whereas wireheaders are deliberately cut off from the Truth of Reality. So the Buddha scenario still doesn’t beat anyone’s lower bounds for good heavens to live in, but it does, in some sense, beat plain wireheading by placing value on material and spiritual/moral reality in the first place.

(In fact, deep readings of Buddhism come right out and say that this spiritual/moral reality is Emptiness, which is pretty accurate, empirically speaking. But Western philosophies are making an excellent point regarding our values when they say that we often/always desire to be entangled with an external spiritual universe (often labelled “God”) more than we desire a perfect but ontologically empty happiness.)

Report comment

By: amyI

amyI — Sat, 08 Feb 2014 14:23:23 +0000

If you could see and understand everything from begging to end I am sure you would beg for the mere complexities of a dull human life.

Report comment

By: Paul Torek

Paul Torek — Tue, 04 Feb 2014 01:03:28 +0000

In other words,
“Should I worry that the valence of a future shifts from “heavily dystopian” to “heavily utopian” with a simple change in decoration?”
Yes.

Report comment

By: Paul Torek

Paul Torek — Tue, 04 Feb 2014 00:54:12 +0000

Nice catch.

Report comment

By: knb

knb — Mon, 03 Feb 2014 05:26:45 +0000

>Should I worry that the valence of a future shifts from “heavily dystopian” to “heavily utopian” with a simple change in decoration?

I would be more worried that a future without any even vaguely human-like entities bothers you so little. These types of navel-gazing entities would simply not be human.

Report comment

By: Tom Hunt

Tom Hunt — Sun, 02 Feb 2014 22:53:12 +0000

Imagining myself-as-myself, somehow abstracted into these hypothetical futures, I do see various substantive differences. For instance, should I come across a habitual wireheader, I imagine (assuming that ‘wireheading’ is its ordinary connotation of normal human bodies and brains hacked minimally to be capable of feeling absolute wire-stimulated pleasure) that I-as-myself would, basically, be more ‘powerful’ than he. By which I mean, he would presumably be essentially unaware of my presence, and unable or ill-adapted (or both) to do much to me; whereas, retaining my ordinary capacities of perception and action, I would be capable of killing him, or shutting down his pleasure-wire or his life support, as a relatively ordinary action. (If the wireheader is in some form of automated system for his provenance which is more robust and/or capable of defending him, the comparison still holds; here, he is merely borrowing the power of others, they presumably in some sense more impressive. I suppose if the wireheader was himself in some degree significantly responsible for the workings of his support system, it would be altered; however, this seems unlikely.) Meanwhile, it is unclear whether I could perceive the existence of the posthuman Buddhas at all, and if I could it is spectacularly unlikely that I would be able to damage them or, indeed, affect them much at all. Meanwhile, they could presumably squish me like a bug as a sub-reflex action, should they ever be disturbed in their eternal serenity enough to care.

Thus, as myself, I perceive the Buddhas as being entities far beyond me, and whom I-as-myself am really not competent to make much judgement on whatsoever; conversely, the wireheader is perceived as an entity essentially comparable to myself, who has degenerated. This seems sufficient difference to justify the change in valence. (For my own judgement, I think a universe consisting only of infinitely serene Buddhas might be a little monotonous; however, I would not disdain their existence, nor strenuously object to becoming one myself, as I would both with regard to the habitual human-ish wireheader.)

Report comment

By: Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky — Sun, 02 Feb 2014 16:23:41 +0000

This post seems like a repeat of http://lesswrong.com/lw/xr/in_praise_of_boredom/. I’m not sure how much pseudomalice to attribute to this particular act, since it is indeed plausible you could have done it accidentally and without the accident being internally motivated.