There’s a lot here, and I will try to address some specific points later. For now, I will say that personally I do not espouse utilitarianism for several reasons, so if you find me inconsistent with utilitarianism, no surprise there. Nor do I accept the complete elimination of all suffering and maximization of pleasure as a terminal value. I do not want to live, and don’t think most other people want to live, in a matrix world where we’re all drugged to our gills with maximal levels of L-dopamine and fed through tubes.
Eliminating torture, starvation, deprivation, deadly disease, and extreme poverty is good; but that’s not the same thing as saying we should never stub our toe, feel some hunger pangs before lunch, play a rough game of hockey, or take a risk climbing a mountain. The world of pure pleasure and no pain, struggle, or effort is a dystopia, not a utopia, at least in my view.
I suspect that giving any one single principle exclusive value is likely a path to a boring world tiled in paperclips. It is precisely the interaction among conflicting values and competing entities that makes the world interesting, fun, and worth living in. There is no single principle, not even maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, that does not lead to dystopia when it is taken to its logical extreme and all other competing principles are thrown out. We are complicated and contradictory beings, and we need to embrace that complexity; not attempt to smooth it out.
Elharo, which is more interesting? Wireheading—or “the interaction among conflicting values and competing entities that makes the world interesting, fun, and worth living”? Yes, I agree, the latter certainly sounds more exciting; but “from the inside”, quite the reverse. Wireheading is always enthralling, whereas everyday life is often humdrum. Likewise with so-called utilitronium. To humans, utilitronium sounds unimaginably dull and monotonous, but “from the inside” it presumably feels sublime.
However, we don’t need to choose between aiming for a utilitronium shockwave and conserving the status quo. The point of recalibrating our hedonic treadmill is that life can be fabulously richer - in principle orders of magnitude richer—for everyone without being any less diverse, and without forcing us to give up our existing values and preference architectures. (cf. “The catechol-O-methyl transferase Val158Met polymorphism and experience of reward in the flow of daily life.”: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17687265) In principle, there is nothing to stop benign (super)intelligence from spreading such reward pathway enhancements across the phylogenetic tree.
There’s a lot here, and I will try to address some specific points later. For now, I will say that personally I do not espouse utilitarianism for several reasons, so if you find me inconsistent with utilitarianism, no surprise there. Nor do I accept the complete elimination of all suffering and maximization of pleasure as a terminal value. I do not want to live, and don’t think most other people want to live, in a matrix world where we’re all drugged to our gills with maximal levels of L-dopamine and fed through tubes.
Eliminating torture, starvation, deprivation, deadly disease, and extreme poverty is good; but that’s not the same thing as saying we should never stub our toe, feel some hunger pangs before lunch, play a rough game of hockey, or take a risk climbing a mountain. The world of pure pleasure and no pain, struggle, or effort is a dystopia, not a utopia, at least in my view.
I suspect that giving any one single principle exclusive value is likely a path to a boring world tiled in paperclips. It is precisely the interaction among conflicting values and competing entities that makes the world interesting, fun, and worth living in. There is no single principle, not even maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, that does not lead to dystopia when it is taken to its logical extreme and all other competing principles are thrown out. We are complicated and contradictory beings, and we need to embrace that complexity; not attempt to smooth it out.
Elharo, which is more interesting? Wireheading—or “the interaction among conflicting values and competing entities that makes the world interesting, fun, and worth living”? Yes, I agree, the latter certainly sounds more exciting; but “from the inside”, quite the reverse. Wireheading is always enthralling, whereas everyday life is often humdrum. Likewise with so-called utilitronium. To humans, utilitronium sounds unimaginably dull and monotonous, but “from the inside” it presumably feels sublime.
However, we don’t need to choose between aiming for a utilitronium shockwave and conserving the status quo. The point of recalibrating our hedonic treadmill is that life can be fabulously richer - in principle orders of magnitude richer—for everyone without being any less diverse, and without forcing us to give up our existing values and preference architectures. (cf. “The catechol-O-methyl transferase Val158Met polymorphism and experience of reward in the flow of daily life.”: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17687265) In principle, there is nothing to stop benign (super)intelligence from spreading such reward pathway enhancements across the phylogenetic tree.