Very interesting post, but your conclusion seems too strong. Presumably, if instead of messing around with artificial experiencers, we just fill the universe with humans being wireheaded, we should be able to get large quantities of real pleasure with fairly little actually worthwhile experiences; we might even be able to get away with just disembodied human brains. Given this, it seems highly implausible that if we try to transfer this process to a computer, we are forced to create agent so rich and sophisticated that their lives are actually worth living.
we just fill the universe with humans being wireheaded, we should be able to get large quantities of real pleasure with fairly little actually worthwhile experiences
By this argument, we might not. If the wireheaded human beings never have experiences and never access their memories, in what way do they remain human beings? ie if we could lobotomise them without changing anything, are they not already lobotomised?
Very interesting post, but your conclusion seems too strong. Presumably, if instead of messing around with artificial experiencers, we just fill the universe with humans being wireheaded, we should be able to get large quantities of real pleasure with fairly little actually worthwhile experiences; we might even be able to get away with just disembodied human brains. Given this, it seems highly implausible that if we try to transfer this process to a computer, we are forced to create agent so rich and sophisticated that their lives are actually worth living.
By this argument, we might not. If the wireheaded human beings never have experiences and never access their memories, in what way do they remain human beings? ie if we could lobotomise them without changing anything, are they not already lobotomised?
Very unseriously: Of course not, because if they were already lobotomized we wouldn’t be able to lobotomize them. :P