You deliberately constructed this scenario so as to manipulate me into judging what the inhabitants experience as less than that, appealing to some superstitious notion of true/pure/honest/all-natural pleasure.
No. I deliberately re-used a similar construct to Wireheading theories to expose more easily that many people disagree with this.
There’s no superstition of “true/pure/honest/all-natural pleasure” in my model—right now, my current brain feels extreme anti-hedons towards the idea of living in Wirehead Land. Right now, and to my best reasonable extrapolation, I and any future version of “myself” will hate and disapprove of wireheading, and would keep doing so even once wireheaded, if not for the fact that the wireheading necessarily overrides this in order to achieve maximum happiness by re-wiring the user to value wireheading and nothing else.
The “weak points” I spoke of is that you consider some “weaknesses” of your position, namely others’ mental states, but those are not the weakest of your position, nor are you using the strongest “enemy” arguments to judge your own position, and the other pieces of data also indicate that there’s mind-killing going on.
The quality of mental states is presumably the only thing we should care about—my model also points towards “that” (same label, probably not same referent). The thing is, that phrase is so open to interpretation (What’s “should”? What’s “quality”? How meta do the mental states go about analyzing themselves and future/past mental states, and does the quality of a mental state take into account the bound-to-reality factor of future qualitative mental states? etc.) that it’s almost an applause light.
No. I deliberately re-used a similar construct to Wireheading theories to expose more easily that many people disagree with this.
Yes, but they disagree because what they want is not the same as what they would like.
The “weak points” I spoke of is that you consider some “weaknesses” of your position, namely others’ mental states, but those are not the weakest of your position, nor are you using the strongest “enemy” arguments to judge your own position, and the other pieces of data also indicate that there’s mind-killing going on.
The value of others’ mental states is not a weakness of my position; I just considered them irrelevant for the purposes of the experience machine thought experiment. The fact that hooking up to the machine would take away resources that could be used to help others weighs against hooking up. I am not necessarily in favor of wireheading.
I am not aware of weaknesses of my position, nor in what way I am mind-killing. Can you tell me?
[...] it’s almost an applause light.
Yes! So why is nobody applauding? Because they disagree with some part of it. However, the part they disagree with is not what the referent of “pleasure” is, or what kind of elaborate outside-world engineering is needed to bring it about (which has instrumental value on my view), but the part where I say that the only terminal value is in mental states that you cannot help but value.
The burden of proof isn’t actually on my side. A priori, nothing has value. I’ve argued that the quality of mental states has (terminal) value. Why should we also go to any length to placate desires?
Hm, a bit over-condensed. More like the burden of proof is on yourself, to yourself. Once you have satisfied that, argument should be an exercise in communication, not rhetoric.
No. I deliberately re-used a similar construct to Wireheading theories to expose more easily that many people disagree with this.
There’s no superstition of “true/pure/honest/all-natural pleasure” in my model—right now, my current brain feels extreme anti-hedons towards the idea of living in Wirehead Land. Right now, and to my best reasonable extrapolation, I and any future version of “myself” will hate and disapprove of wireheading, and would keep doing so even once wireheaded, if not for the fact that the wireheading necessarily overrides this in order to achieve maximum happiness by re-wiring the user to value wireheading and nothing else.
The “weak points” I spoke of is that you consider some “weaknesses” of your position, namely others’ mental states, but those are not the weakest of your position, nor are you using the strongest “enemy” arguments to judge your own position, and the other pieces of data also indicate that there’s mind-killing going on.
The quality of mental states is presumably the only thing we should care about—my model also points towards “that” (same label, probably not same referent). The thing is, that phrase is so open to interpretation (What’s “should”? What’s “quality”? How meta do the mental states go about analyzing themselves and future/past mental states, and does the quality of a mental state take into account the bound-to-reality factor of future qualitative mental states? etc.) that it’s almost an applause light.
Yes, but they disagree because what they want is not the same as what they would like.
The value of others’ mental states is not a weakness of my position; I just considered them irrelevant for the purposes of the experience machine thought experiment. The fact that hooking up to the machine would take away resources that could be used to help others weighs against hooking up. I am not necessarily in favor of wireheading.
I am not aware of weaknesses of my position, nor in what way I am mind-killing. Can you tell me?
Yes! So why is nobody applauding? Because they disagree with some part of it. However, the part they disagree with is not what the referent of “pleasure” is, or what kind of elaborate outside-world engineering is needed to bring it about (which has instrumental value on my view), but the part where I say that the only terminal value is in mental states that you cannot help but value.
The burden of proof isn’t actually on my side. A priori, nothing has value. I’ve argued that the quality of mental states has (terminal) value. Why should we also go to any length to placate desires?
To a rationalist, the “burden of proof” is always on one’s own side.
Hm, a bit over-condensed. More like the burden of proof is on yourself, to yourself. Once you have satisfied that, argument should be an exercise in communication, not rhetoric.
Agree completely.
This would seem to depend on the instrument goal motivating the argument.