Wireheading is a term in science fiction and thought experiments, denoting the general concept of utilizing artificial, direct stimulation on the human brain to create pleasure¹. A typical rationalist argument for wireheading goes something like this.

1. Humans today live and work in order to gain more happiness
2. Happiness (or pleasure) is just a neurological process taking place in the human brain
3. With sufficient technology, any neurological process can be artificially stimulated directly in the brain, via chemical, electrical, or other means (with wires in the head, so to speak)
4. We can artificially create happiness in humans via wireheading. Not just any happiness either, but the strongest, purest form of it, more intense and desirable than any that can be achieved through living
5. Since more happiness is what humans want, wireheading should be strictly superior to the non-wireheaded pursuit of happiness through living

The argument seems to make sense logically. So then why is it that whenever anything related to (or resembles) wireheading is written about, such as in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, it is almost always in a dystopian context? At personal levels as well, with myself and the people that I’ve talked to, most people feel like that being wireheaded is somehow bad, and definitely not the outcome that we should strive to attain for all humans. Why do we seem to have this tendency to dislike the notion of being wireheaded?

A potential answer is that although happiness is great and necessary, in its purest form, is not the best for humans (at least as a singular pursuit). Happiness (or pleasure) on its own is shallow, and one should pursue things with meaning instead, for a more wholistic version of wellbeing. But then if the feelings of meaningfulness, fulfilment, and contentness are also just neurological processes in the brain, then we could simply tweak the parameters of our wireheading machine and maximize those feelings instead. The utility function that the wireheading machine optimizes for would be more complex (i.e. instead of pure happiness, it would be based on a combination of various desirable feelings), but ultimately can still be induced artificially.

You can go a bit deeper, and further argue that wireheaded feeling of happiness (or the set of feelings based on the more complex utility function) is not real. Sure, you can stimulate the feeling in my brain that I just saved a million starving children from death, but there is no actual change in the state of wellbeing of a million children, so it isn’t the same as the feeling of happiness after having done the work. A term used with this argument is “counterfeit utility”, which is fundamentally different from “real utility”. With this line of reasoning, we can devolve into the age-old debate of what is real (the Matrix vs the real world), but it does not really explain our aversion to being wireheaded. We can make the assumption that with wireheading technology, nobody would suffer in our hypothetical future world, and that everyone would be wireheaded and experience constant bliss. Surely this is strictly superior to a world that still has problems, where people gain happiness by trying to solve these problems?

One way to explain our aversion to wireheading is to simply say that we are wrong. Perhaps like the people who hated the idea of automobiles at the start of the 20th century, we are wrong to cling to our “horse carriages” (i.e. the current, normal way of life), because that’s all we know. If only we knew what being wireheaded felt like, we would definitely prefer it to our current lives. This is certainly a very solid explanation in my opinion, but we do have to contend with the question of whether we are still the same after knowing what being wireheaded is like. There is a post by Kaj Sotala that explores this idea in more detail. The argument there is essentially that if experiencing X has caused a change in a person’s preferences by altering their brain, then you cannot claim that it was wrong for the person to not want X, pre-experiencing X.

I think a key reason for our (with our 21st century, pre-experiencing wireheading brains) aversion to wireheading is the more general aversion to constancy. More broadly, this is also the reason that almost all utopian visions of society have a dystopian component in their cores, at least if you consider them more carefully. There is a sense of permanence in these utopian dreams, where once achieved, the state of the world will remain constant from that point on. The world of wireheaded humans is no different in this regard. A fundamental difference between the wireheaded world and our current world is the lack of predictability in the latter. Even if we could program the wireheading machines to randomly vary the level of happiness (or even sprinkle in a bit of negative feelings occasionally), it would still be a relatively unchanging world, when looked at from the outside. We would not have any incentive to do anything else. Even if there is something more desirable than wireheading, we would never find it if we were all wireheaded.

The aversion to constancy is most likely rooted in our evolutionary history. Humans are suited for the constant adaptation in an ever-changing world. In fact, we need to dislike constancy to some degree in order to survive. This is one of the theories that tries to explain the downfall of the Neanderthals. It postulates that the Neanderthals were more content with stability, and as a result their exploratory instinct was weaker than that of the Homo sapiens. The humans on the other hand were more unsatisfied with the same stability, and thus were more willing to head into the unknown, even at great risk (e.g. sailing into the endless ocean). In turn we were rewarded with more discoveries, faster development, and survived (and thrived) to this day, while the Neanderthals were driven to extinction.

Of course, with wireheading, we could make all that irrelevant. After all, it is difficult to care about how static the world is when you are permanently experiencing constant orgasmic joy. But I think the creature that would be content with being wireheaded is probably as different from us as we are from the Neanderthals.

Or perhaps we would be less averse to a partial version of the wireheaded world, where we could engage in wireheading when we want, but also leave and do other things if we choose to. Although it is questionable whether anyone would want (or have the will power) to leave a wireheading machine once inside.