Anonymous asked: For the record I would sign up for lifelong wireheading in an instant if it were a thing. I think 99% of objections come down to people not being able to conceive of pure happiness. "But you wouldn't be *really* happy because..." nope. I would. You press the happy button and you get happy. Maybe I wouldn't be as creative or ambitious or whatever, but I would by definition not be unhappy about it.

wirehead-wannabe:

Yeah C. S. Lewis’ thing about people being unhappy about the lack of sex in heaven always comes to mind. For those not familiar, he thinks it’s a stupid concern and compares it to a child who, upon learning that sex is a thing that adults do for pleasure, asks how something can be enjoyable if it doesn’t involve eating chocolate.

I mean there’s more to it than just that usually, since a lot of people will acknowledge that they would like it but make objections related to wanting or approving or some other unspecified sense that there’s more to life than feeling good. Which obviously I still find unconvincing, and I really should get to writing out why.

The reason I wouldn’t do it (which I’m sure will not be new to you) is that I have a hard time conceiving of “happiness” outside of some structured experience of doing things with consequences.

(Cut for amateur neuroscience bullshitting, talking about recreational drugs,, etc.)

For instance, when I have personally taken euphoriant drugs, they’ve always made me want to do things.  Sometimes the things are relatively passive and non-goal-oriented (like watching a movie), but I’ve never had an experience of euphoria that somehow made me so inherently satisfied that I didn’t want to seek out more stimulation of various kinds.

I guess such a state is conceivable (although I think it would be very different from anything I currently experience), but the drug examples do seem to constrain what wireheading could actually be in reality.

To do some handwavey bullshit neuroscience, euphoriant drugs act on various receptor systems but generally they have something to do with dopamine, even if it’s downstream from the direct mechanism of action.  (I’ve seen a number of papers use “increases dopamine activity in certain areas [nucleus accumbens, striatum, etc.?]” as a proxy for “addictive” or “potential drug of abuse.”)

But dopamine activity in “reward centers” isn’t just about feeling good, it’s also part of a system involving motivation and goal-directed behavior, and when people take drugs that directly act on dopamine in this fashion (amphetamine, cocaine, etc.) they tend to become more motivated to do things and interact with the world rather than just sitting there blissing out.

Even as a bullshitting amateur I know this is too simple – the evidence on how opioids interact with dopamine seems more equivocal and complicated? – but at least it seems like there is some vague neuroscientific support for my own subjective impression that pleasure and motivated behavior are intrinsically entangled.

A more general statement might be that I have a hard time conceiving of happiness that isn’t happiness about something.  Like many people, I do sometimes have days where I just wake up and am unusually happy even though nothing unusually good has happened, but this still manifests itself solely as positivity towards something – say, “this thing I’m reading about is really cool,” or just “the world as a whole seems like a good place today, and I feel hope about its future.”

(An extreme case of the latter was a time I took psychedelic mushrooms and had a roughly hour-long period of what was probably the deepest bliss I’ve ever experienced, during which I kept thinking about the concept that human life was largely “a solved problem” because older people can tell younger people about their mistakes and successes, and because we can all read accounts written down by people from the past – that none of us had to figure this out all for ourselves, that we were part of this chain of human lives that was steadily learning more and more about how to live.)

Even though these kinds of blissful states may involve simply mulling over hopeful ideas rather than doing anything, I can’t imagine being in such a state persistently without wanting to actually act on these hopeful ideas.  If that psychedelic state had persisted I’m sure I would have gone and asked old people about their lives or read relevant books or something.  (At the time I thought a lot about having kids and passing what I knew on to them.)  So even pure moments of bliss felt while sitting motionless in a chair aren’t, for me, unrelated to the cycle of motivation and action and specific input/output.