I looked up Jeffery Martin, the author of the paper, and found a remarkable disconnect between the negative things he has to say about PNSE and all of his other writings.
From viewing a couple of his interviews on YouTube, I gathered that there are two possible explanations for this. One is the he was initially motivated to study PNSE because he wasn’t feeling happy despite achieving conventional success and saw PNSE as a possible way to achieve sustained happiness and well-being, so that could explain why he’s not too bothered by PNSE being more like wireheading than making a person more effective at achieving real-world objectives. Two is that he didn’t personally attempt to achieve PNSE until 2010, after he had done all of the research described in the paper (and probably after writing the paper itself), and having the actual PNSE biased him to think of PNSE more positively afterwards.
I am guessing that from behind the distance of fiction, this is more or less what he believes or hopes to be the case.
I wouldn’t read too much into those books, because according to the interviews they were almost entirely written by a co-author, for the purpose of trying to reach people with PNSE and gathering them as subjects for his research project.
Two is that he didn’t personally attempt to achieve PNSE until 2010, after he had done all of the research described in the paper (and probably after writing the paper itself), and having the actual PNSE biased him to think of PNSE more positively afterwards.
So even when he knew it was wireheading (or at least, had observed all the parts of that concept without necessarily having a word for it), he got sucked in when he had the experience himself.
From viewing a couple of his interviews on YouTube, I gathered that there are two possible explanations for this. One is the he was initially motivated to study PNSE because he wasn’t feeling happy despite achieving conventional success and saw PNSE as a possible way to achieve sustained happiness and well-being, so that could explain why he’s not too bothered by PNSE being more like wireheading than making a person more effective at achieving real-world objectives. Two is that he didn’t personally attempt to achieve PNSE until 2010, after he had done all of the research described in the paper (and probably after writing the paper itself), and having the actual PNSE biased him to think of PNSE more positively afterwards.
I wouldn’t read too much into those books, because according to the interviews they were almost entirely written by a co-author, for the purpose of trying to reach people with PNSE and gathering them as subjects for his research project.
So even when he knew it was wireheading (or at least, had observed all the parts of that concept without necessarily having a word for it), he got sucked in when he had the experience himself.
Wireheading does that.