Sharing The World With Digital Minds

There is reason to think that engineered minds could enjoy much greater durations and intensity of pleasure. Human psychology has evolved to generate pleasure and pain where this motivated behaviors associated with reproductive fitness in past generations, not to maximize well-being. This entails for us a great deal of hard-to-avoid suffering. Our enjoyments, meanwhile, are doled out only sparingly. Culinary pleasures are regulated by hunger, sexual ones by libido. Pleasure drawn from relative status or power over others is structurally scarce. Most rewards are also moderated by mechanisms such as boredom and tolerance, which progressively reduce the delight obtained from repeated stimuli or continual benign conditions. For digital minds, these restrictions could be loosened to allow sustainable intense pleasures alongside liberation from the painful parts of present human existence.

Evolutionary considerations give some support for this hypothesis. Insofar as intensity
of pleasures and pains correspond to strength of behavioral responses, evolution
should tend to adjust hedonic experiences to yield approximately fitness-maximizing
degrees of effort to attain or avoid them. But for human beings, it is generally much
easier to lose large amounts of reproductive fitness in a short time than to gain an
equivalent amount. Staying in a fire for a few moments can result in permanent injury
or death, at the cost of all of an organism’s remaining reproductive opportunities. No
single meal or sex act has as much at stake per second—it takes weeks to starve, and
the expected number of reproducing children produced per minute of mating is small.
Thus, evolution may have had call to generate more intensely motivating-per-second
pains in response to injury than pleasures in response to positive events. Engineered
minds, by contrast, could be crafted to experience pleasures as intensely rewarding
as the worst torments are disrewarding. Bliss or misery more completely outside of
the human experience might also be possible.


Even if human brain size were optimal for generating awareness or moral status, it still
wouldn’t follow that human brain structure is so. Large parts of our brains seem
irrelevant or only weakly relevant for the amount of awareness or the degree of moral
status we possess. For instance, much cortical tissue is dedicated to processing
high-resolution visual information; yet people with blurry vision and even persons who
are totally blind appear to be capable of being just as aware and having just as high
moral status as those with eagle-eyed visual acuity.

Wait, this is interesting, a small portion of my mind is reponsbile for generating awareness, most of it is just for allowing me to live. Huh.

SOME PATHS TO SUPERHUMAN WELFARE ● reproductive capacity ● cost of living ● subjective speed ● hedonic skew ● hedonic range ● inexpensive preferences ● preference strength ● objective list goods and flourishing ● mind scale

We have to upload human minds otherwise it would be immoral to prevent machine welfare to allow humans to be well off.

Also, we should learn more about consciousness so we can create these digital minds.

[[Neuroscience]] [[Transhumanism]] [[Consciousness]]