Drawing a line between utility and perception of utility is difficult for humans, because happiness can be seen either as utility itself or as a sometimes-fallible utility detector. If you treat happiness as a terminal value, you’re open to wireheading (or the best available equivalent, which today would be psychoactive chemicals). On the other hand, f you treat it as only a proxy for some other utility function, then you ought to treat most forms of entertainment, and non-reproductive sex, as giving only counterfeit utilons. There are workarounds, like accepting only utilons from sources that were available in the ancestral environment, or excluding mind-altering drugs as a special case, but they leave wirehead-enabling loopholes.
Drawing a line between utility and perception of utility is difficult for humans, because happiness can be seen either as utility itself or as a sometimes-fallible utility detector.
If it were easy and automatic to make this distinction, I would not have felt compelled to call attention to it.
f you treat it as only a proxy for some other utility function, then you ought to treat most forms of entertainment, and non-reproductive sex, as giving only counterfeit utilons.
Not necessarily; it depends on what that other utility function is.
Drawing a line between utility and perception of utility is difficult for humans, because happiness can be seen either as utility itself or as a sometimes-fallible utility detector. If you treat happiness as a terminal value, you’re open to wireheading (or the best available equivalent, which today would be psychoactive chemicals). On the other hand, f you treat it as only a proxy for some other utility function, then you ought to treat most forms of entertainment, and non-reproductive sex, as giving only counterfeit utilons. There are workarounds, like accepting only utilons from sources that were available in the ancestral environment, or excluding mind-altering drugs as a special case, but they leave wirehead-enabling loopholes.
If it were easy and automatic to make this distinction, I would not have felt compelled to call attention to it.
Not necessarily; it depends on what that other utility function is.