Re: The wirehead problem

Tim Tyler <seemysig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Curt Welch wrote:

What happens when you have a society of AIs that can't be fooled by
such tricks and all of them accept and fully understand the fact that
they are doing what they are doing because they have carrots and sticks
built into them making them do it?

The first big problem is that once they fully understand what they are,
they will fully understand the wirehead problem. This means, they will
accept that that all their behavior is regulated by carrots and sticks,
and if they just accept that is what they are, then they accept that
there goal in life is to get the most carrots and the fewest sticks.
If they are able to modify themselves to give themselves more carrots
and stop the sticks. They will - it's what they were built to do and
the know it is what they were built to do. [...]

This isn't my understanding of my goal in life.

http://originoflife.net/gods_utility_function/

...explains what I think I - and other living systems - are "for".

From such a perspective, wireheading yourself doesn't help.

Well, I'd just say that your belief above is a meme that has infected you.
And that it will only continue to infect you as long as it seems to be in
line with your prime motivations.

I haven't thought much about this idea of entropy maximizing as being a
good candidate for god's utility function. My instinct is to reject it.

Entropy increase is just a measure of the spread of energy. Energy just
happens to want to spread out in this universe (it's just happens to be
very low level fact of what happens in this universe) and as it does it,
entropy increasses (since that is what entropy is a measure of).

Complexity forms almost by accident in my view. It seems to form when
energy gets mostly blocked, and is forced to leak out though a few cracks
in the system. It tends to create increasing complexity at these locations
- at the cracks in the energy leaks.

When you have a body of gas, and heat one side of it, the energy flows to
the other side without creating much complexity at all. But if you place a
wall between the two, and put a small hole in the wall, the energy is
forced to flow through the "leak" in the "wall", and in doing so, starts to
create complexity as the point of the leak in the form of sound waves
gradating outward.

On the surface of the earth, the sun's energy is blocked from radiating out
into space, and leaks out though a complex process of absorption and
radiation as the earth spins which gives rise to weather and ultimately all
the "stirring" effect which I think creates complex structure on the
surface of the earth at the complex boundaries between liquid solids and
gasses.

For one thing, I think it's very wrong to treat "life" special in these big
picture views. I think it's far more important to see evolution in the
view of the evolution of all structure in the universe and to see life as
just the tip of that iceberg of complex structure. Rivers, mountains,
weather patterns all are the result of the same process as life is.

Is the purpose of a river to maximize entropy? Is the purpose of a rock to
maximize entropy? If you can't say yes to to all these sorts of questions,
you can't say that entropy maximizing is god's utility function.

As energy spreads out, things get colder, and transform from gasses into
liquids and solids. Once they do that, they stop the spread of energy -
they act to slow down the rate of increase in entropy.

So can we then make the argument that the purpose of any solid structure is
to maximize entropy when in fact, its formation actually slows down the
spread of energy and acts to block the increase of entropy? If the true
utility function of the universe was to maximize entropy, then solids
wouldn't exist. Everything would stay as a gas because a gas is far far
better at maximizing entropy than any solid is.

So the fact that solids exist is proof to me that the idea that maximizing
entropy is not the reasons complex solid structures form at all.

As the universe cools down (energy flows out - entry increases), gases turn
into solids and form structures. Any part of the universe that tends to
hover near the solid gas temperature and where a mechanism that causes it
to bounce up and down will create a constant stirring effect with the side
effect of ever increasing complexity of structure.

If you freeze a lake, it turns into a smooth layer of ice with very little
complexity of structure. But if instead, you freeze it, warm it, freeze
it, warm it, over and over, without ever letting it completely melt, very
complex structures natural form in the ice. The purpose of those
structures have little in my view to do with maximizing entropy (energy
flow). They are just a natural side effect of what happens at this
boundary between the transition from liquid to solid. And that transition
exists, because there are multiple forces at work regulating the structure
of the universe, and that transition is where one set of forces (kinetic
energy of motion - aka heat) trades places with another set of forces
(atomic attraction) in being the dominate force controling the shape of the
matter.

On the different structures that form, in the boundary locations where
energy is trying to leak out, the ones that form, are simply the ones that
manage to exist. Survival of structure happens not because the structure
is good allowing energy flow, but at it's foundation, it's good at
surviving in the face of energy flow - it's a structure that makes energy
flow elsewhere so that it can survive, while the energy flows, and
transforms, other structures instead.

Rocks for example are damn good survival structures because they resit the
flow of energy making them change into something else. Rain drops are not
very good at survival. Waves are not very good at survival compared to
rocks. However, waves are much better at maximizing entropy than rocks
are. So again, if entropy maximizing was the key to the formation of
complex structures, we wouldn't have rocks, we would only have waves and
rain drops.

The only utility function I see at work here is survival. Structures of
matter that are better at surviving in the face of constant energy flows,
do survive.

Structure formation happens when parts of the universe tend to hover around
these transition points in matter which tend to create blocks of energy,
and leaks - like the hot vents in the ocean floor where the heat from the
earth is trying to leak out into space though the crust of the earth -
which is blocking energy flow. There is a constant stirring of the
structures at these cracks which creates a constant exploration of
different structures which feeds the basic system of evolution and greatly
speeds it up - where lots of different structures are created and destroyed
by the action around the "leak" which leads to the evolution of greater
complexity - as long as greater complexity has a survival value.

It is very true that higher life forms tend to assist the flow of energy.
But they do it because it's a survival tool for them. It's an arms race
against the other survival structures. If you can control energy flow, you
can keep the energy flow from causing your destruction, and use it to cause
the destruction of other structures that might want to do the same to you.
There is no general need to maximize energy flow. It's just the fact that
the more energy you can control, the more likely you are to "win" the arms
race. We see this happen very much at our macro level of existence as we
fight over control of oil and food for example. But it happens all the way
down the line of complexity when we see organisms using energy to create
more copies of themselves. They regulate the flow of energy to make it
produce more copies of themselves from surrounding material, instead of
letting the surrounding material use the same energy, to do the same to
them.

So I have to stand with the true god function being survival in the face of
energy flow, and "entropy maximizing" not a goal, but rather, just a useful
technique for winning the game of survival.

However, lets get back to _your_ goal (and the goal of all humans).

Though the human body evolved because it was good at wining the survival
game, we have a brain as just one tool that is part of the total reasons we
are good at survival. But it is my "brain" far more so than my "whole body"
which is witting this message here. The rest of my body doesn't give a ***
about Usenet messages on the philosophy of life. Each part of the body is
doing that it does, which helps the whole system survival - pump blood,
filter blood, fight of infections, digest food, etc. ALl the modules have
their "purpose" here. But the module talking to you, is not the heart, or
the kidneys, it's the brain.

I say all this just to point out that "I" (the one witting this message) is
really just a brain located in a human body. "I" work with the other body
parts to help us all survive - just like I work with the other members of
my family to help us all survive - just like I work with the other members
of this Usenet group to help us all survive.

My goal (as a brain), isn't survival. My goal is just to maximize future
reward as defined by my internal reward systems. I am a machine built for
the single purpose of creating maximum long term happiness as defined by my
reward system. It so happens that evolution created in me a set of primary
rewards that work very well at transporting my genes into the future.
However, if I knew how to modify myself to change my reward system, I could
achieve my ultimate goal without being a slave to the desires of my genes.
I could create maximal happiness without having to bother with food and
sex.

So I would argue, that since we are not humans, as much as we are just
brains in a human body, that our goal is to seek maximal happiness. And as
such, the real goal of us human brains, is not to keep our genes alive, but
to make ourselves as happy as possible - which for the most part - (since
wire heading is not a viable option for most of us at the moment) - is that
we should seek to work together to create maximal happiness in all the
human brains that exist in the earth. And if some people are happiest,
reproducing and raising kids, then that's fine for them, but if others want
to seek maximal happiness by paying for a wirehead procedure to be
performed on them so they can die in a state of perfect bliss, then we
should let them to that.

If maximizing entropy was our true goal, we should all go out and burn down
all the forests, and burn up all the oil, and build a lot of atomic bombs
to try and turn the planet earth back into a gas cloud which would maximize
it's entropy. Maximizing entropy is just not what our goal or purpose is.

Sure, we increase entropy when we turn a cow into a pile of ***, but
that's nothing compared to what I can do with dynamite and fire! So why do
we use the very slow and ineffective process of digestion to maximize
entropy when we could just do it so much better with dynamite! It's
because we were built by our genes as tools to help the genes survive and
maximizing entropy doesn't help our genes survive.

The idea that the purpose of humans is to survive is a meme which has
infected us with the help of Darwin. But it's an error. Because though we
were built by our genes as tools to help then survive, we are rally just a
brain, with the sub-goal of creating maximal long term happiness. We need
to replace this meme of survival, with the real goal - which is creating
happiness - and we need to understand that everyone develops different
sub-goals that they become slave to in order for them to be happy (like a
pedophiles odds needs, or the needs of a gay person).

To live together, we need to recognize everyone's needs, and do what we can
to create a society where everyone has as much happiness as we can create
for them. Our needs are in constant conflict and we have to balance those
conflicts, but that's what we should see as our purpose in life - to find
the balance points that makes everyone as happy as possible.

From this perspective, wire heading all of society at once would be the
ultimate achievement of our goals (once everyone understood and agreed to
this plan).

It would totally fail to reach the goals of our genes, but hell, that's
there problem, not ours. They fucked up by building us (human brains) and
trusting their future to us.

:)

--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@xxxxxxxx http://NewsReader.Com/
.