My take is that we (the characters) have some wireheadable goals (e.g. curing a headache), but we also have plenty of goals best understood externally.
But the “player” is a less clearly goal-oriented process, and we can project different sorts of goals onto it, ranging from “it wants to make the feedback signal from the cortical neurons predict the output of some simple pattern detector” to “it wants us to avoid spiders” to “it wants us to be reproductively fit.”
My take is that we (the characters) have some wireheadable goals (e.g. curing a headache), but we also have plenty of goals best understood externally.
But the “player” is a less clearly goal-oriented process, and we can project different sorts of goals onto it, ranging from “it wants to make the feedback signal from the cortical neurons predict the output of some simple pattern detector” to “it wants us to avoid spiders” to “it wants us to be reproductively fit.”