amitlevy49

This is a crosspost of a post from my blog, Metal Ivy. The original is here: A Disciplined Way To Avoid Wireheading. What is wireheading? The term wireheading comes from the observation that if you put a wire in someone’s brain such that it is near their brain’s pleasure (or craving) center, and give them a lever that when pressed activates the current through the wire, they will repeat that action forever, to the point of dying from starvation. Conditional on them trying it once, of course. These experiments have been performed on mice, dolphin, monkeys, and in the distant unethical annals of the 1970s, humans. A happy mouse? Personally, though I am not alone in this view, I see wireheading not as an independent phenomenon, but instead the edge of a spectrum. These neurons were not created by evolution for some other task that is being tricked by wireheading to cause cravings to pull a lever. They were evolved precisely to give you a craving to perform an action to get dopamine. It just didn’t want you to do it quite so directly (if you oppose the framing of “goals” for evolution, take it as a rhetorical device, or call it Moloch[1]). Evolution has many pathways for getting you to do what it wants. The craving mechanism is one of them, but you also have a more stable sense of utility — that sense tells you that, actually, being addicted to pulling a lever to directly stimulate your brain is “bad”. You want to get pleasure in a less direct, more natural way. You don’t want to trick your own brain. The craving and the perceived, externalized utility contradict, especially if you were to reflect on the subject before the first pull of the lever. This article will take the stance that this sense of utility is important, as an axiom, since we find it to be important by its very definition. We do not want it to contradict with our actions, which means we don’t want to stimulate our dopamine secreting neurons so directly. On the possibility of just not inserting a w