Re: Hacking your own motivational and emotional systems, how dangerous?

From: Byrne Hobart (sometimesfunnyalwaysright@gmail.com)
Date: Thu Oct 25 2007 - 11:03:10 MDT


On 10/25/07, Matt Mahoney <matmahoney@yahoo.com> wrote:
> If an agent could change its motivational system, it would figure out a way to
> directly stimulate its reward system and go into a degenerate state. Animals
> evolved to make this impossible for good reason.

Maybe. Or perhaps they'd become driven discoverers and reproducers,
and wipe out whatever reward system-stimulators were left. There's a
difference between 'pleasure' and 'happiness' -- if there weren't,
your vision would be a reality. Drugs are cheap, and they stimulate
reward systems, so under a purely pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding
system, we'd all be buying enough smack to overdose and die pleased.



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:58 MDT