I find Greg Egan’s Permutation City relevant here, particularly the character of Peer. He gives himself arbitrary desires over time, say collecting butterflies or making table legs with a lathe. Re-design the brain to enjoy some arbitrary, meaningless task for a finite time. It is one way of implementing jb’s notion. At one point, he constructs a simulation that is perfectly circular: the experience is a closed loop that leads him back to his starting point and mental state. He realizes that he could maintain this one infinitely, or, with no loss, just run it once and permanently shut down.
Or as another character explains, how does it all feel? “However I want it to feel.”
I find Greg Egan’s Permutation City relevant here, particularly the character of Peer. He gives himself arbitrary desires over time, say collecting butterflies or making table legs with a lathe. Re-design the brain to enjoy some arbitrary, meaningless task for a finite time. It is one way of implementing jb’s notion. At one point, he constructs a simulation that is perfectly circular: the experience is a closed loop that leads him back to his starting point and mental state. He realizes that he could maintain this one infinitely, or, with no loss, just run it once and permanently shut down.
Or as another character explains, how does it all feel? “However I want it to feel.”