This seems to be true only if your mental states of knowledge can have no effect on things that you care about… that is to say, it’s pretty clearly false!
Sometimes humans care about their own mental states. It might count positively in my utility function that I not be psychologically distressed. Plausibly, learning certain bits of knowledge that I can’t use practically (“The Great Old Ones are about to awake and devour the earth!”) might have this effect with no compensating benefits, and so learning them would have negative utility.
Alternatively, my state of knowledge may affect something in the world. If I’m very bad at concealing my knowledge, then knowing about the secret conspiracy to take over the world may just get me killed: that’s pretty clearly negative utility. Or, say, on being told that the fate of the world rests upon my performance in some task, I’m likely to do worse than if I didn’t know (due to nerves).
In short: if you’re a disembodied observer who merely picks effects to occur in the world, and whose utility function ranges strictly over things in the world other than yourself, then this might be true. Otherwise, not so much.
This seems to be true only if your mental states of knowledge can have no effect on things that you care about… that is to say, it’s pretty clearly false!
TRIGGER WARNING: If your brain works approximately like mine reading my link may literally make you physically uncomfortable for several minutes.
When looking into this, I found a meme which refers to pieces of information that your brain or body normally automatically takes care of for you, and that being reminded of it causes your consciousness to take manual control, which is disconcerting because you are distracted by dealing with the irrelevant information for a while, despite the fact that in general, this is handled automatically.
This seems to be true only if your mental states of knowledge can have no effect on things that you care about… that is to say, it’s pretty clearly false!
Sometimes humans care about their own mental states. It might count positively in my utility function that I not be psychologically distressed. Plausibly, learning certain bits of knowledge that I can’t use practically (“The Great Old Ones are about to awake and devour the earth!”) might have this effect with no compensating benefits, and so learning them would have negative utility.
Alternatively, my state of knowledge may affect something in the world. If I’m very bad at concealing my knowledge, then knowing about the secret conspiracy to take over the world may just get me killed: that’s pretty clearly negative utility. Or, say, on being told that the fate of the world rests upon my performance in some task, I’m likely to do worse than if I didn’t know (due to nerves).
In short: if you’re a disembodied observer who merely picks effects to occur in the world, and whose utility function ranges strictly over things in the world other than yourself, then this might be true. Otherwise, not so much.
TRIGGER WARNING: If your brain works approximately like mine reading my link may literally make you physically uncomfortable for several minutes.
When looking into this, I found a meme which refers to pieces of information that your brain or body normally automatically takes care of for you, and that being reminded of it causes your consciousness to take manual control, which is disconcerting because you are distracted by dealing with the irrelevant information for a while, despite the fact that in general, this is handled automatically.
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/you-are-now-breathing-manually
I’ll admit I was aware of some of those, but some of them were entirely disconcertingly novel.