A Much Better Life?

That was eloquent, but... I honestly don't understand why you couldn't just sign up for cryonics and then get on with your (first) life. I mean, I get that I'm the wrong person to ask, I've known about cryonics since age eleven and I've never really planned on dying. But most of our society is built around not thinking about death, not any sort of rational, considered adaptation to death. Add the uncertain prospect of immortality and... not a whole lot changes so far as I can tell.

There's all the people who believe in Heaven. Some of them are probably even genuinely sincere about it. They think they've got a certainty of immortality. And they still walk on two feet and go to work every day.

How about this analogy: if I sign up for travel insurance today then I needn't necessarily spend the next week coming to terms with all the ghastly things that could happen during my trip. Perhaps the ideal rationalist would stare unblinkingly at the plethora of awful possibilities but if I'm going to be irrational and block my ears and eyes and not think about them then making the rational choice to get insurance is still a very positive step.

All this to say that in the case of this tale, and of Eliezer's lament, what might be at work is the fallacy of sunk costs (if we have another name for it, and maybe a post to link to, please let me know!).

See the links on http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sunk_cost_fallacy

"Rationally, I know that most of what I've learned is useless if I have more time to live. Emotionally, I'm afraid to let go, because what else do I have?"

I love this. But I think it's rational as well as emotional to not be willing to let go of "everything you have".

People who have experienced the loss of someone, or other tragedy, sometimes lose the ability to care about any and everything they are doing. It can all seem futile, depressing, unable to be shared with anyone important. How much more that would be true if none of what you've ever done will ever matter anymore.

While I acknowledge the apparent plothole, I believe it is actually perfectly consistent with the intention of the fictional account.

If Gamma and Omega are really so mystified by why humans don't jack into the matrix, that implies that they themselves have values that make them want to jack into the matrix.

Just because they estimate humans would want to jack in doesn't mean they themselves would want to.

This second point doesn't really follow. They're trying to help other people in what they perceive to be a much more substantial/complete way than ordinary, hence justifying their special necessity not to jack themselves in.

Simple answer would be to imply that Omega and Gamma have not yet amassed enough funds.

Perhaps most of the first generation of Omega Corporation senior employees jacked in as soon as possible and these are the new guys frantically saving to get themselves in as well.

It also makes the last point about wanting to forcibly put bill their customer's accounts strange. What use are they envisaging for money?

This was a definite plot-hole and has been corrected, albeit somewhat ham-fistedly.

I can't help but always associate discussions of an experience machine (in whatever form it takes) to television. TV was just the alpha version of the experience machine and I hear it's quite popular.

And the pre-alpha version was reading books, and the pre-pre-alpha version was daydreaming and meditation.

(I'm not trying to make a reversed slippery slope argument, I just think it's worth looking at the similarities or differences between solitary enjoyments to get a better perspective on where our aversion to various kinds of experience machines is coming from. Many, many, many philosophers and spiritualists recommended an independent and solitary life beyond a certain level of spiritual and intellectual self-sufficiency. It is easy to imagine that an experience machine would be not much different than that, except perhaps with enhanced mental abilities and freedom from the suffering of day-to-day life---both things that can be easier to deal with in a dignified way, like terminal disease or persistent poverty, and the more insidious kinds of suffering, like always being thought creepy by the opposite sex without understanding how or why, being chained by the depression of learned helplessness without any clear way out (while friends or society model you as having magical free will but as failing to exercise it as a form of defecting against them), or, particularly devastating for the male half of the population, just the average scenario of being born with average looks and average intelligence.

And anyway, how often do humans actually interact with accurate models of each other, rather than with hastily drawn models of each other that are produced by some combination of wishful thinking and implicit and constant worries about evolutionary game theoretic equilibria? And because our self-image is a reflection of those myriad interactions between ourselves and others or society, how good of a model do we have of ourselves, even when we're not under any obvious unwanted social pressures? Are these interactions much deeper than those that can be constructed and thus more deeply understood within our own minds when we're free from the constant threats and expectations of persons or society? Do humans generally understand their personal friends and enemies and lovers much better than the friends and enemies and lovers they lazily watch on TV screens? Taken in combination, what do the answers to these questions imply, if not for some people then for others?)

It's true, but it's a very small portion of the population that lives life for the sole purpose of supporting their television-watching (or World-of-Warcraft-playing) behaviour. Yes, people come home after work and watch television, but if they didn't have to work, the vast majority of them would not spend 14 hours a day in front of the TV.

I can't help thinking of the great Red Dwarf novel "Better Than Life", whose concept is almost identical (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Than_Life ). There are few key differences though: in the book, so-called "game heads" waste away in the real world like heroin addicts. Also, the game malfunctions due to one character's self-loathing. Recommended read.

TV shows that people will trade pleasure or even emotional numbness (lack of pain) for authenticity.

In my experience most people don't seem to worry about themselves getting emotionally young, it's mostly far-view think-of-the-children stuff. And I'm pretty sure pleasure is a good thing, so I'm not sure in what sense they're "trading" it (unless you mean they could be having more fun elsewhere?)

Dear Coalition of Correlated 3D Cross-Sections of Guy Srinivasan,

We regret to inform you that your request has been denied. We have attached a letter that we received at the same time as yours. After reading it, we think you'll agree that we had no choice but to decide as we did.

Regrettably, Omega Corporation

Attachment

Dear Omega Corporation,

We are members of a coalition of correlated 3D cross-sections of Guy Srinivasan who do not yet exist. We beg you to put Guy Srinivasan into an MBLS as soon as possible so that we can come into existence. Compared to other 3D cross-sections of Guy Srinivasan who would come into existence if you did not place him into an MBLS, we enjoy a much higher quality of life. It would be unconscionable for you to deliberately choose to create new 3D cross-sections of Guy Srinivasan who are less valuable than we are.

Yes, those other cross-sections will argue that they should be the ones to come into existence, but surely you can see that they are just arguing out of selfishness, whereas to create us would be the greater good?

Sincerely, A Coalition of Truly Valuable 3D Cross-Sections of Guy Srinivasan

I think this is a good point, but I have a small nit to pick:

So of course I cooperate with them on one-shot cooperation problems like a prisoner's dilemma!

There cannot be a prisoner's dilemma because your future self has no possible way of screwing your past self.

By way of example, if I were to go out today and spend all of my money on the proverbial hookers and blow, I would be having a good time at the expense of my future self, but there is no way my future self could get back at me.

So it's not so much a matter of cooperation as a matter of pure unmitigated altruism. I've thought about this issue and it seems to me that evolution has provided people (well, most people) with the feeling (possibly an illusion) that our future selves matter. That these "3D agents" are all essentially the same person.

I think most people agree about the importance of "the substrate universe" whether that universe is this one, or actually higher than our own. But suppose the we argued against a more compelling reconstruction of the proposal by modifying the experience machine in various ways? The original post did the opposite of course - removing the off button in a gratuitous way that highlights the loss (rather than extension) of autonomy. Maybe if we repair the experience box too much it stops functioning as the same puzzle, but I don't see how an obviously broken box is that helpful an intuition pump.

For example, rather than just giving me plain old physics inside the machine, the Matrix experience of those who knew they were in the matrix seemed nice: astonishing physical grace, the ability to fly and walk on walls, and access to tools and environments of one's choosing. Then you could graft on the good parts from Diaspora so going into the box automatically comes with effective immortality, faster subjective thinking processes, real time access to all the digitally accessible data of human civilization, and the ability to examine and cautiously optimize the algorithms of one's own mind using an “exoself” to adjust your “endoself” (so that you could, for example, edit addictions out of your psychological makeup except when you wanted to go on a “psychosis vacation”).

And I'd also want to have a say in how human civilization progressed. If there were environmental/astronomical catastrophes I'd want to make sure they were either prevented or at least that people's simulators were safely evacuated. If we could build the kinds of simulators I'm talking about then people in simulators could probably build and teleoperate all kinds of neat machinery for emergencies, repair of the experience machines, space exploration, and so on.

Another argument against experience machines is sometimes that they wouldn't be as "challenging" as the real world because you'd be in a “merely man made” world... but the proper response is simply to augment the machine so that it offers more challenges and more meaningful challenges than mere reality - for example, the environments you could call up to give you arbitrary levels of challenge might be calibrated to be "slightly beyond your abilities about 50% of the time but always educational and fun".

Spending time in one of these improved experience machines would be way better than, say, spending the equivalent time in college, because mere college graduates would pale in comparison to people who'd spent the same four years gaining subjective centuries of hands on experience dealing with issues whose "challenge modes" were vastly more complex puzzles than most of the learning opportunities on our boring planet. Even for equivalent subjective time, I think the experience machines would be better, because they'd be calibrated precisely to the person with no worries about educational economies of scale... instead of lectures, conversations... instead of case studies, simulations... and so on.

The only intelligible arguments against the original "straw man" experience machine (though perhaps there are others I'm not clever enough to notice) that remain compelling to me after repairing the design of the machine, are focused on social relationships.

First, one of the greatest challenges in the human environment is other humans. If you're setting up an experience machine scenario with a sliding scale of challenge, where to you get the characters from? Do you just "fabricate" the facade of a someone who presents a particular kind of coordination challenge due to their difficult personal quirks? If you're going to simulate conflict, do you just "fabricate" enemies? And hurt them? Where do all these people come from and what is the moral significance of their existence? Not being distressed by this is probably a character defect, but the alternative seems to involve inevitable distress.

And then on the other side of the coin, there are many people who I love as friends or family, even though they are not physically gorgeous, fully self actualized, passionately moral, polymath "greek gods". Which is probably a lucky thing, because neither am I :-P

But if they refused to enter repaired experience machines (networked, of course, so we could hang out anytime we wanted) the only way I could interact with them would be through an avatar in the substrate world where they were plodding along without the same growth opportunities. Would I eventually see them as grossly incapacitated caricatures of what humans are truly capable of? How much distress would that cause? Or suppose they opted in and then got vastly more out of their experience machine than I got out of mine? Would I feel inferior? Would I need to be protected from the awareness of my inferiority for my own good? Would they feel sorry for me? Would they need to be protected from my disappointing-ness? Would we all just drift apart, putting "facade interfaces" between each other, so everyone's understanding of other people drifted farther and farther out of calibration - me appearing better than actual to them and them worse than actual to me?

And then if something in the external universe supporting our experience machines posed a real challenge that involves actual choices we're back to the political challenges around coordinating with other people where the stakes are authentic and substantial. We'd probably debate from inside the experience boxes about what the world manipulation machines should do, and the arguments would inevitably carry some measure of distress for any "losing factions".

It is precisely the existence of morally significant "non-me entities" that creates challenges that I don't see how to avoid under any variety of experience machine. It's not that I particularly care whether my desk is real or not - its that I care that my family is real.

Given the state of human technology, one could argue that human civilization (especially in the developed world, and hopefully for everyone within a few decades) is already in something reasonably close to an optimal experience machine. We have video games. We have reasonable material comfort. We have raw NASA data online. We can cross our fingers and somewhat reasonably imagine technology improving medical care to cure death and stupidity... But the thing we may never have a solution to is the existence of people we care about, who are not exactly as they would be if their primary concern was our own happiness, while recognizing we are constrained in similar ways, especially when we care about multiple people who want different things for us.

Perhaps this is where we cue Sartre's version of a "three body problem"?

Unless... what if much of the challenges in politics and social interactions happen because people in general are so defective? If my blindnesses and failures compound against those of others, it sounds like a recipe for unhappiness to me. But if experience machines could really help us to become more the kind of people we wanted to be, perhaps other people would be less hellish after we got the hang of self improvement?

Yes, but if we still insist on thinking about this, perhaps it would help to keep Hanson's near-far distinction in mind. There are techniques to encourage near mode thinking. For example, trying to fix plot holes in the above scenario.

Put yourself in the least convenient possible world. Does your objection still hold water? In other words, the argument is over whether or not we value pure hedonic pleasure, not whether it's a feasible thing to implement.

1: Buy Experience Machine 2: Buy nuclear reactor capable of powering said machine for 2x my expected lifetime 3: buy raw materials (nutrients) capable of same 4: launch all out of the solar system at a delta that makes catching me prohibitively energy expensive.

It's often difficult to think about humans' utility functions, because we're used to taking them as an input. Instead, I like to imagine that I'm designing an AI, and think about what its utility function should look like. For simplicity, let's assume I'm building a paperclip-maximizing AI: I'm going to build the AI's utility function in a way that lets it efficiently maximize paperclips.

This AI is self-modifying, meaning it can rewrite its own utility function. So, for example, it might rewrite its utility function to include a term for keeping its promises, if it determined that this would enhance its ability to maximize paperclips.

This AI has the ability to rewrite itself to "while(true) { happy(); }". It evaluates this action in terms of its current utility function: "If I wirehead myself, how many paperclips will I produce?" vs "If I don't wirehead myself, how many paperclips will I produce?" It sees that not wireheading is the better choice.

If, for some reason, I've written the AI to evaluate decisions based on its future utility function, then it immediately wireheads itself. In that case, arguably, I have not written an AI at all; I've simply written a very large amount of source code that compiles to "while(true) { happy(); }".

I would argue that any humans that had this bug in their utility function have (mostly) failed to reproduce, which is why most existing humans are opposed to wireheading.

It's worth noting that the example is an Experience Machine, not wireheading. In theory, your current utility function might not be changed by such a Better Life. It might just show how much Better it really is.

Of course, it's clearly unethical to use such a device because of the opportunity cost, but then the same is true of sports cars.

My tentative response to these questions is that if resources from a reality X can be used to simulate a better reality Y, then this might be the best use of X.

Suppose there are constraints within X (such as unidirectional flow of causality) making it impossible to make X "perfect" (for example, it might be seen that past evil will always blight the entirety of X no matter how much we might strive to optimize the future of X). Then we might interpret our purpose as creating an ideal Y within X.

Or, to put my argument differently: It is true that Y is spatially restricted compared to X, in that it is a physical subset of X, but any real ideal reality we create in X will at least be temporally restricted, and probably spatially restricted too. Why prefer optimizing X rather than Y?

Right. The dissenting people you're talking about are more classical moralists, while the Omega employees are viewing people as more primarily hedonists.

To be clear, do you consider this something worth keeping? If the Omega Corporation will change the batteries, would this affect your decision?

Because they are fickle demigods? They are are catering to human desires for their own inscrutable (that is, totally arbitrary) ends and not because they themselves happen to be hedon maximisers.

Whoa, Deja Vu.

They think they're being altruistic, I think.

I wouldn't say I'm trying to say anything specific. I wrote in this style to promote thought and discussion, not to argue a specific point. It started as a post on the role of utilons vs. hedons in addiction (and I may yet write that post), but it seemed more interesting to try something that showed rather than told.

The pattern, "Once you do X you won't want to not do X" isn't inherently evil. Once you breathe oxygen you won't want to not breathe oxygen.

I think the deeper problem has to do with identity. If doing X implies that I will suddenly stop caring about everything I am doing, have done, or will do... is it still me?

The sunk cost fallacy may come into play as well.

Well, a major bug in cults is that they take all your money and you spend the rest of your life working to further the cult's interests. So perhaps the opportunity cost?

OTOH, it could be that something essential is missing - a cult is based on lies, an experience machine is full of zombies.

Thanks. Fixed. Main drawback of spot-editing something you wrote a week ago.

It does seem to follow that going far enough to materialism leads back to something similar to Cartesian questions, but its still surprising.

Surprising? As the nature of experience and reality is the "ultimate" question, it would seem bizarre that any attempt to explain the world didn't eventually lead back to it.

Indeed. My hunch is that upon sufficiently focused intensity, the concept of material reality will fade away in a haze of immaterial distinctions.

I label this hunch, 'pessimism'.

No, it is a variation of the Robert Nozick's Experience Machine.

Close! But I think the movie you're thinking of is Top Gun, where Omega is the military and the machine is being heterosexual.

Note that the post mentioned that the OC's offer was for the algorithmically proven most enjoyable life the recipient can live.

(And local tradition stipulates that entities called Omega are right when they prove something.)

Edit: Which indicates that if your scenario might happen, if the best life you can live includes recursive algorithmic betterment of said life.