playing God

[Metric]

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Also, why would they appreciate the world? Have you ever seen that show on MTV... "my sweet 16" (not sure if this is the exact title). It is the one where the extremely wealthy families throw birthday parties for the rich and spoiled daughters. I believe one girl got extremely angry and whiney because she did not receive her new BMW or Mercedez in the proper color. Do you think giving this girl everything she wanted made her appreciate the world more, less, or the same? Do you think it would be the same or different for our sentient beings in the program?

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I guess if you could deeply apologise and upgrade her to a Ferrari in the proper color -- and could continue the series of ever-more-absurd demands indefinately... Well -- that might result in an overall higher level of happiness. But we're definately talking about a weird form of life here if every individual gets this kind of treatment.

[Matt R.]

I don't know Metric. If I were God of a programmed universe, my "well of infinite resources" would certainly spew Ferraris out at will. It would even have a button to choose the desired color.

If someone then got angry at me for allowing them to wreck their new Ferrari, I would just smite them. What's the over/under on length of time before an internet message evolves criticizing my Ferrari well for not making Lamborghinis? Think someone will write a book called "The Matt Delusion", or "Letter to a Metrician Nation"? [Edit -- had to correct the title of one of the classics]

[Metric]

Well I certainly can't fault the desire to eradicate unpleasantness. It might even be possible to do, if you were God over your universe. But it's far from obvious, and it seems much farther from practical in our little "grad student running evolution sim on university's computer" thought experiment.

[Matt R.]

Right, I can definitely understand the desire to. I just don't see a solution to the problem, unless our programmed universe becomes static in every way. In other words, I don't see how dynamic, conscious beings could exist in such a program. It seems like "unpleasantness" is a necessary feature.

What I meant by my last (over the top) post, was that I would hope someone could conceive of how to program such an "unpleasantness free" universe before criticizing the program. [Edit: Also, I really don't think that a decent solution is "giving the sentient beings whatever they want"] The bottom line is, I simply don't see how such a program could exist unless we constantly tinkered with the code. And once we did that, doesn't ALL of the original programming lose all value? Would the beings be able to understand their universe at all? It would seem that any sort of structure resembling the physics of our world could not exist in such a program.

I don't deny the possibility that there would be a way around this, and we *could*, possibly, create the program in such a way where there is no pain. I would just hope that if I ever made such an elegant program, that the sentient beings inside would not criticize me unless they could solve the problem of "pain" themselves. Otherwise, it would appear that any criticism amounts to a bunch of hand-waving, would it not? It's sort of like saying "there is clearly a better way to prove this theorem, but I don't know what it is and your way is inefficient and stupid."

[Matt R.]

Oh yeah, to answer your original thought experiment rather than sticking to the tangent from the replies:

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Since you are completely omnipotent over this universe, what are your responsibilities to these life forms, and at what point do you become responsible?

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I don't think I have any responsibilities if the universe is self-contained. In other words, if my creation can continue to exist without my help. However, I would almost certainly find my project fascinating, and given the amazement I would likely feel over my accomplishment I would almost certainly "watch over" my program and see what my little computational life-forms are up to. I may, *on occasion*, tinker with things if I don't like the way they are going. Can I zoom in and observe an individual program that I think is particularly interesting? If so, I may get involved on a personal level with some of them. Of course this is all based off of personal desire, but I can't imagine I wouldn't feel some sort of connection with my program. But, I don't think I am responsible for anything beyond keeping the program going (the rest is just stuff I would want to do).

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And if your computing power should, at the end of the semester, be required by the university for other purposes and projects, are you prepared to break any rules to prevent your program from being deleted?

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Certainly. But it depends on what those rules are. I would definitely fight to keep the program going for as long as I (we) am/are capable of. But I live in my own universe, with rules that I may not be able to break, so I may be limited to some extent as to what I can accomplish.

[madnak]

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Obviously torture is caused by pain in some form. If we are removing all pain, thereby removing all forms of temporary torture, what would our sentient programs derive pleasure from? As an example, one way people in our world tend to experience pleasure or happiness is through working hard to achieve something difficult. If you never experienced pain anywhere along the way, then it would be easy.

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Not buying it, even this far. Frustration is what I feel when something is too hard, and boredom when it's too easy. When it's just challenging, I feel excited and engaged - I feel great, and sometimes even get more pleasure from the process of accomplishing something than from actually accomplishing it. If it's frustration I feel, then I'm just tired and relieved when it's all over with.

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If it was easy, then no hard work was involved along the way. It would be about as difficult as me opening a door.

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Or about as difficult as getting fellatio - you're using a situation where there is no pleasure or pain, I'm talking about a situation with pleasure but without pain. Then again, maybe you like the teeth.

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I certainly derive more pleasure from say, learning a difficult subject thoroughly than I do opening a door.

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And more than from fellatio? Hey, we all have our preferences. But once again, "hard" and "painful" are two different things. Especially since I'm talking about subjective pain - "suffering" might be a better term. A sore muscle isn't pain if you enjoy it and it makes you happy.

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This is because it was difficult along the way, there were certainly moments of frustration (a form of psychological pain),

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No, there weren't. I don't even get much frustration when I study, I get more boredom. But again, both frustration and boredom indicate an inappropriate challenge level. So far I have worked hard at school, studying for over 30 hours per week. But the challenge level was low, so I just felt bored while doing it and had no problem getting a 4.0. A challenge level that's slightly higher would have made the entire experience outright pleasurable - what pain there was universally detracted from the pleasure. My accomplishment would feel like so much more if I hadn't been bored on the way there.

I also look for difficult in video games I play, and in a good game I'll never feel pain. I can get... obsessive with games. Sometimes I can very much enjoy trying a challenge over and over again. However, I get frustrated like everyone else - when I do I stop playing right away and come back the next day, because frustration makes the game a chore and I'm playing it for entertainment.

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and when it actually clicks in my mind I experience a form of pleasure. Removing any sort of pain (and thereby any sort of difficulty in doing something) would certainly seem to remove any sort of pleasure derived from the experience. Would the experiences of our sentient beings in the program be different in some way if I wrote code which prevented them from experiencing any sort of temporary pain or torture?

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This seems like an appropriate place to bring up another point - the severity is highly relevant. I don't think anyone even claims to get pleasure from an experience that is absolutely frustrating. In fact, I would argue that almost everyone, even when they accomplish something extremely difficult, feel a much greater amount of pleasure during the process than pain. To take a look at the opposite end, which is probably more relevant anyhow... Most people (the vast majority) have never been tortured. Almost none of the people who have experienced really sublime happiness have been tortured. Most of those who have been tortured endure depression and anxiety, as well as associated problems and sometimes even more severe ones such as psychosis, throughout the rest of their lives. If an ideal life requires a recipe of 95% pleasure/5% pain, then (even though I say 100/0) I don't think that contradicts my position. Your assumption that all pain is eliminated is not justified by any of our posts, and I'll get further into that later.

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I also agree that they definitely would not understand happiness in the way we do. Does understanding the experience of happiness pose no inherent value for the sentient programs? Why or why not?

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I think not. The happiest people I've known didn't understand their happiness. And those most capable of understanding their emotions have typically been those who've struggled with mental illness. I see no correlation between understanding of an emotion and ability to appreciate that emotion.

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Also, why would they appreciate the world? Have you ever seen that show on MTV... "my sweet 16" (not sure if this is the exact title). It is the one where the extremely wealthy families throw birthday parties for the rich and spoiled daughters. I believe one girl got extremely angry and whiney because she did not receive her new BMW or Mercedez in the proper color. Do you think giving this girl everything she wanted made her appreciate the world more, less, or the same? Do you think it would be the same or different for our sentient beings in the program?

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Two final points.

First and most importantly, I think the idea that she gets everything she wants is a bit shallow. What she wants is concern and attention from her parents, as well as structure and discipline. "Discipline" in particular has become a word with unpleasant association, but it's definitely possible to have discipline and yet experience no associated pain. As for structure, it's downright comforting. There is no evidence that her happiness and pleasure would increase with a better car - on the contrary, it's the simple emotional needs that seem to be the major source of pleasure, and so in a world without pain those are the issues that would be addressed.

The second point is that nobody has said anything about giving everyone whatever they want. I would do that, ideally, but it's not the position I'm arguing for here. What we are suggesting is giving them everything they need. The examples we're using are violence, famine, disease and torture. I don't think for a moment that people would be less able to experience happiness if all those things were eliminated. I think the example revots used to describe what he meant by "torture" was a starving African child, not a spoiled prissy teenager.

[madnak]

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It seems like we're creating a situation where it's immoral to run a sufficiently advanced "evolution sim" unless you the programmer are prepared to spend all of your time making sure that every new demand by every individual is met. I guess there's no reason this has to be wrong a priori, but it seems a bit unreasonable to me -- but maybe that's because my intuition is based on a world where competition (and thus, suffering) are the norm.

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Well, I'd spend at least one "hour" per day with them, yes. I mean, ideally as soon as I saw life arise I'd have to make some choices. Hard choices, of course. I might have to wait at least until the advent of civilization before intervening. I would probably just delete the program as soon as single-celled organisms emerged. Prevent the suffering entirely. The idea of creating a whole universe of suffering, even if it does get me past a basic technological barrier, is intolerable to me. Then again, I might make excuses like "if I don't do it, someone else will," or "the happiness I can provide over a million years is more meaningful than the suffering I'll cause over a few millenia."

[madnak]

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I think that's valid, but you are forgetting a minor detail known as God.

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I think Metric's point is totally valid.

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I don't think we agree on what Metric's point was.

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In our example, we ARE God for our program.

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This was the point of my response to him - I can control the evolution directly, and prevent undesirable traits from emerging.

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In our program, the pain mechanism evolved to help the sentient beings cope with the world.

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No, the pain mechanism evolved to help the organisms acquire the resources and environments necessary to sustain themselves. It is useless ("not selected for" or "not fit," I should say - evolution doesn't work toward a purpose, it just happens) when those resources are abundant.

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If we actively removed it through coding, thereby removing all forms of temporary torture and pain, what do you think would happen to the beings in our program? How would they know if something is bad or not?

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The utility of identifying "bad" and "good" states is the selection of the good states over the bad. If there are no bad states, there would be no such utility. Of course, given the scenario described the ideas of more preferable and less preferable would presumably remain consistent. Even emotions such as anger might continue to be associated with such conditions. But as anger is typically a response to a threatening or intolerable situation, the absence of such situations should prevent most of it.

[Matt R.]

If the studying a difficult subject example doesn't work for you, I'll try to generalize.

If we have an individual who is very unhappy and experiences a lot of pain in their life, I don't think it is a stretch to say that it doesn't take much to make that person feel good in some way. Of course it depends on the individual, but in general, if someone has a lot of crappy things happening to them at once, and someone goes out of their way to do even the tiniest thing to make them feel better, it can potentially make a huge difference. Now if we take away that extreme discomfort, it would appear that it takes "more" to make that person happy. A starving person may be ecstatic over a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but a wealthy person who eats like a king probably doesn't go nuts when someone offers them a PB&J. For strong evidence of this, look at the opposite extreme. People who are extremely spoiled may get angry because their birthday present is a Mercedez in the WRONG COLOR. When we remove all the bad stuff and the struggle in their life, they tend to lose all perspective about what is important.

Now what some of you appear to be suggesting to do, is to alter the code of our program in some way to remove short spans of torture, which is certainly caused by pain. What I am wondering, is why would you do such a thing? I could understand re-coding occasionally if it suits your fancy, but to insure no unhappiness or pain seems like a stretch to me. Especially when it almost certainly leads to a sense of being spoiled in the sentient beings, and their getting angry over the color of their new Mercedez.

As to the claim that you are not suggesting to remove all displeasure: this goes back to Metric's point. Once you remove the "lowest common denominator" of discomfort, won't your programs then demand that the next level up be removed as well? When does it stop?

I guess what I am wondering is this. Say you decide you want to re-code your program to feed a starving young person from a poor region. How do you justify intervening to give someone with X amount of food a free ticket, yet NOT give the person with X + dX (tiniest amount possible) the food? If you say, "well I'll give both of them the food" it appears to me you've just started a giant cascade where you must give into everyone's demands to not turn into an almighty ass. Better get that infinite Ferrari well working.

[Matt R.]

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I think the example revots used to describe what he meant by "torture" was a starving African child, not a spoiled prissy teenager.

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Just to reiterate, because I think this may make my point considerably more clear.

My point in using the prissy spoiled teen as an example, is that even after you give someone all the resources they could ever need and want, they will almost certainly STILL FIND SOMETHING TO COMPLAIN ABOUT. You and revots made the suggestion that you would re-code to give someone food. If there are examples of people that have an extravagance of wealth, yet they are still unhappy, what makes you think giving people food will "solve" the problem of pain in the programmed world?

Unless you think unhappiness in rich people isn't real, but I don't think that rich people are making stuff up when they claim to be depressed or unhappy.

And if we do decide to just relegate our intervention to consumable necessities, what happens if we give our starving person a meal yet someone with more power steals it from them? Or what happens when they can't find clothes or shelter? What if the climate they are in is unbearably cold or hot? I suppose my main question is still where do you decide to draw the cut-off point for your intervention, and how do you come up with that point?