Your belief value is irrelevant to reality.
Of course all human activity is associated with pain and pleasure because
evolution gave us pleasure and pain to motivate us to do smart things (as
far as evolution is concerned) and avoid stupid things (and yes, I am
anthropomorphizing evolution for ease of communication but if you can't
figure out what I really mean . . . . ).
However, correlation is not equivalent to causation.
Goal is survival or propagation of species. Evolution rewards or punishes
according to these goals. If you ignore these goals and reprogram your
pleasure and pain you go extinct.
More clearly, if you wire-head, you go extinct (i.e. you are an evolutionary
loser).
Go ahead and wirehead if you wish but don't be surprised if someone with the
same values decides that he is allowed to kill you painlessly since you're
eating up their resources to promote their own pleasure.
But then again, it really doesn't matter because you're extinct either way,
right?
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jiri Jelinek" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <agi@v2.listbox.com>
Sent: Friday, June 13, 2008 4:34 PM
Subject: Re: [agi] Nirvana
a) pain avoidance and pleasure seeking are our primary driving forces;
On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 3:47 PM, Mark Waser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Yes, but I strongly disagree with assumption one. Pain avoidance and
pleasure are best viewed as status indicators, not goals.
Pain and pleasure [levels] might be "indicators" (or "primary action
triggers"), but I think it's ok to call "pain avoidance" and "pleasure
seeking" "our driving forces". I cannot think of any intentional
human activity which is not somehow associated with those primary
triggers/"driving forces" and that's why I believe the assumption one
is valid.
Best,
Jiri
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