I came to the idea after a previous lesswrong topic discussing nihilism, and its several comments on depression and suicide. My argument is that wire heading in its extreme or complete/full form can be easily modeled as suicide, or less strongly as volitional intelligence reduction, at least given current human brain structure and the technology being underdeveloped and hence understood and more likely to lead to such end states.
I define Full Wire Heading as that which a person would not want to reverse after it ‘activates’ and which deletes their previous utility function or most of it. a weak definition yes, but it should be enough for the preliminary purposes of this post. A full wire head is extremely constrained, much like an infant for e.g. and although the new utility function could involve a wide range of actions, the activation of a few brain regions would be the main goal, and so they are extremely limited.
If one takes this position seriously, it follows that only one’s moral standpoint on suicide or say lobotomy should govern judgments about full wire heading. This is trivially obvious of course, but to take this position as true we need to understand more about wire heading, as data is extremely lacking especially in regards to human like brains. My other question then is to what extent could such an experiment help in answering the first question?
Complete Wire Heading as Suicide and other things
I came to the idea after a previous lesswrong topic discussing nihilism, and its several comments on depression and suicide. My argument is that wire heading in its extreme or complete/full form can be easily modeled as suicide, or less strongly as volitional intelligence reduction, at least given current human brain structure and the technology being underdeveloped and hence understood and more likely to lead to such end states.
I define Full Wire Heading as that which a person would not want to reverse after it ‘activates’ and which deletes their previous utility function or most of it. a weak definition yes, but it should be enough for the preliminary purposes of this post. A full wire head is extremely constrained, much like an infant for e.g. and although the new utility function could involve a wide range of actions, the activation of a few brain regions would be the main goal, and so they are extremely limited.
If one takes this position seriously, it follows that only one’s moral standpoint on suicide or say lobotomy should govern judgments about full wire heading. This is trivially obvious of course, but to take this position as true we need to understand more about wire heading, as data is extremely lacking especially in regards to human like brains. My other question then is to what extent could such an experiment help in answering the first question?