To be explicit about this, I don’t have an opinion on whether I’d choose it, but I do find it attractive. Just repeating this because everyone seems to think I’m advocating it and so I probably didn’t make this clear enough.
But your actual question:
Do you think you’ll have access to that technology in your lifetime?
Basically, I think it’s long here. The Tibetans in particular have developed some neat techniques that are still somewhat time-intensive to learn, but work reasonably well. The route (several specific forms of) meditation + basic hedonism seems like a decent implementation, especially because I already know most of the underlying techniques.
Also, MDMA and related drugs and basic implants already exist, though they’re still fairly crude and hard to sustain. I’d expect the technology for “good enough” wireheading through direct stimulation to be available in at most 20 years, though probably not commercially.
Chronic MDMA use causes a decrease in concentration of serotonin transporters.
Lottery winners end up no where near as happy, long-term, as they imagined they would be when they bought the ticket (Brickman, Coates, Janoff-Bulman 1978).
This is weak evidence, but it suggests that wire-heading in practice isn’t going to look like it does in the thought experiment—I imagine neural down-regulation would play a part.
So you want to wirehead. Do you think you’ll have access to that technology in your lifetime?
To be explicit about this, I don’t have an opinion on whether I’d choose it, but I do find it attractive. Just repeating this because everyone seems to think I’m advocating it and so I probably didn’t make this clear enough.
But your actual question:
Basically, I think it’s long here. The Tibetans in particular have developed some neat techniques that are still somewhat time-intensive to learn, but work reasonably well. The route (several specific forms of) meditation + basic hedonism seems like a decent implementation, especially because I already know most of the underlying techniques.
Also, MDMA and related drugs and basic implants already exist, though they’re still fairly crude and hard to sustain. I’d expect the technology for “good enough” wireheading through direct stimulation to be available in at most 20 years, though probably not commercially.
Chronic MDMA use causes a decrease in concentration of serotonin transporters.
Lottery winners end up no where near as happy, long-term, as they imagined they would be when they bought the ticket (Brickman, Coates, Janoff-Bulman 1978).
This is weak evidence, but it suggests that wire-heading in practice isn’t going to look like it does in the thought experiment—I imagine neural down-regulation would play a part.