#Relatable. Have some long philosophical ramble in comment form.
Wireheading...always comes across as instinctively deeply repulsive to me. Even when it's done in very low-effort ways (a pill is a lot easier to swallow, literally, than planting electrodes in a brain directly). I'm too old to be that attached to any one aspect of my "identity" anymore: there's enough fundamental core to my conception of selfhood that any surface-level bits are just window dressing, comfortably optimized between local conditions and my own preferences. But that's a far cry from the entire self being fungible. And it seems pretty hubristic/limited to assume one could find unlimited happiness with just the elements one has in the brain already...the full range of qualia is so much greater than that. Even with removing the hedonic treadmill, I'd feel cheated knowing that I'm just rerunning the same few pleasure routines over and over. The same applies to utopian simulations in other fiction: no matter how complex, they are ultimately finite in size compared to actual reality. (Anecdotally, this seems to be why many people quit lucid dreaming - they get bored. Perhaps they'd like Imaginaerum?)
Maybe we all die and get reborn each night in our sleep...the question of degree still matters though. The me who wakes up each day is a lot more coherent-over-time than the me who emerges after a heady <s>apple-fueled</s> psychedelic trip, or theoretically after taking a pill from Neurodelta Inc. I think we're not really equipped to handle large coherence gaps, either as individuals or as a society. Sometimes this leads to good things - lotsa people report breaking out of long-term cognitive ruts after shrooms! Sometimes it's just bad - the pain of losing a loved one to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's is so much greater than if they had, say, a stroke. But even just examining our own past selves can be profoundly alienating, like checking old social media posts or childhood mementos. "Was that really me?"
Still. A long time ago, I felt like the guy in Quantum Roulette, and woulda bet the farm on any form of eternal future bliss to escape present Hell. (Sometimes it still feels like a mistake, like the "real reality" is the branch where I don't exist now.) Such tempting thoughts still creep up now and again, in the dark moments of life's troughs. I'm on board for Death Is The Enemy as a good terminal value: so much of human endeavor is fuelled by our fear of dying, effort that is endlessly rationalized as Good Actually, or For A Reason, when it's so plainly not. But wireheading feels like the wrong answer. The question neither character asked: functionally, what is the difference between someone in a Euphorium coma, and someone who's dead? Neither are around to experience pain anymore, and "the absence of pain" is definitely not the worst definition possible for pleasure. It's basically a clever way to launder and monetize assisted suicide, given the (apparent) inevitability of addiction. And it's readily apparent why even the "try it and forget it!" version would end in addiction: humans are so, so bad at resisting temptation. Who better to authentically talk us into something than ourselves?
(Minor nitpick: AFAIK, mirror neurons got binned after The Replication Crisis, along with many similar neurobiology findings. But if they did work as stated via Empathium, then two people both on Empathium meeting each other would...have some sort of Aumann's Agreement Theorem infinite-recursion? exponential growth? personality meltdown/fusing. It's like the helmets in Psycho-Pass: have to have at least one non-Empathium person nearby to copy, or the goggles do nothing.)
Thanks for sharing your thoughts once again! The idea for the piece definitely stems from my own aversion to wire-heading, and wrestling with other thoughts around thinking about identity, and what you would ultimately chose to do if you could customize how your mind works.
Good catch on the mirror neurons bit, if I don't want to bother editing I could pretend the salesman doesn't perfectly keep up with the science. I wonder if actual empathy presents the same problem with recursion and feedback loops as that proposed scenario would.
#Relatable. Have some long philosophical ramble in comment form.
Wireheading...always comes across as instinctively deeply repulsive to me. Even when it's done in very low-effort ways (a pill is a lot easier to swallow, literally, than planting electrodes in a brain directly). I'm too old to be that attached to any one aspect of my "identity" anymore: there's enough fundamental core to my conception of selfhood that any surface-level bits are just window dressing, comfortably optimized between local conditions and my own preferences. But that's a far cry from the entire self being fungible. And it seems pretty hubristic/limited to assume one could find unlimited happiness with just the elements one has in the brain already...the full range of qualia is so much greater than that. Even with removing the hedonic treadmill, I'd feel cheated knowing that I'm just rerunning the same few pleasure routines over and over. The same applies to utopian simulations in other fiction: no matter how complex, they are ultimately finite in size compared to actual reality. (Anecdotally, this seems to be why many people quit lucid dreaming - they get bored. Perhaps they'd like Imaginaerum?)
Maybe we all die and get reborn each night in our sleep...the question of degree still matters though. The me who wakes up each day is a lot more coherent-over-time than the me who emerges after a heady <s>apple-fueled</s> psychedelic trip, or theoretically after taking a pill from Neurodelta Inc. I think we're not really equipped to handle large coherence gaps, either as individuals or as a society. Sometimes this leads to good things - lotsa people report breaking out of long-term cognitive ruts after shrooms! Sometimes it's just bad - the pain of losing a loved one to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's is so much greater than if they had, say, a stroke. But even just examining our own past selves can be profoundly alienating, like checking old social media posts or childhood mementos. "Was that really me?"
Still. A long time ago, I felt like the guy in Quantum Roulette, and woulda bet the farm on any form of eternal future bliss to escape present Hell. (Sometimes it still feels like a mistake, like the "real reality" is the branch where I don't exist now.) Such tempting thoughts still creep up now and again, in the dark moments of life's troughs. I'm on board for Death Is The Enemy as a good terminal value: so much of human endeavor is fuelled by our fear of dying, effort that is endlessly rationalized as Good Actually, or For A Reason, when it's so plainly not. But wireheading feels like the wrong answer. The question neither character asked: functionally, what is the difference between someone in a Euphorium coma, and someone who's dead? Neither are around to experience pain anymore, and "the absence of pain" is definitely not the worst definition possible for pleasure. It's basically a clever way to launder and monetize assisted suicide, given the (apparent) inevitability of addiction. And it's readily apparent why even the "try it and forget it!" version would end in addiction: humans are so, so bad at resisting temptation. Who better to authentically talk us into something than ourselves?
(Minor nitpick: AFAIK, mirror neurons got binned after The Replication Crisis, along with many similar neurobiology findings. But if they did work as stated via Empathium, then two people both on Empathium meeting each other would...have some sort of Aumann's Agreement Theorem infinite-recursion? exponential growth? personality meltdown/fusing. It's like the helmets in Psycho-Pass: have to have at least one non-Empathium person nearby to copy, or the goggles do nothing.)
Thanks for sharing your thoughts once again! The idea for the piece definitely stems from my own aversion to wire-heading, and wrestling with other thoughts around thinking about identity, and what you would ultimately chose to do if you could customize how your mind works.
Good catch on the mirror neurons bit, if I don't want to bother editing I could pretend the salesman doesn't perfectly keep up with the science. I wonder if actual empathy presents the same problem with recursion and feedback loops as that proposed scenario would.