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Say your son becomes a heroin addict. All he does all day is get high and waste his life. He has UBI and lives in social housing, so his financial situation isn't precarious. He has a sophisticated future chip implant for dosage that always just stops him from ingesting a fatal dose. He never goes outside, and he has a dark web supplier who delivers by mail (easily affordable on his UBI check), so he's no aesthetic or criminal or otherwise problem for the public.
Would you be happy for him? Would you be proud of him? Would you care about him doing that with his life?
Call it empathy, but I do care, I do consider it my business, and I have interest in stopping others from doing so, whether they are my family or my community or my countrymen and women or just the wider human race. There are a lot of decent people out there who deserve better than a life as an addict, having never created anything. It doesn't have to be "of value", this isn't an economic question. In a post-scarcity world I think it better for people to play sports, socialize in person, work with their hands, craft, cook, construct, have children, raise them, fall in love (with each other). Is that an aesthetic preference? Sure.
But it's also an empathetic one. Most people don't have the agency and the time preference setup to be able to autonomously turn off the dopamine pump. We don't know if we would, which is why they tell you never to try heroin. Even plenty of people who want to quit tobacco never make it, even if they really want to. It seems to me supremely arrogant to assume that so many people, not least yourself, have that degree of control over their own happiness, their own destiny. This is likely a philosophical difference between us.
Sometimes people need to be saved from themselves. You acknowledge this in the way in which we often discuss it, homeless drug addicts threatening people on subways, feral children who never finish school, but it's not just about the negative externalities, not just about the fact that it makes things harder for me, or for you. It's about them too, and about us, because while we maintain a work ethic and some discipline today, who knows how that will hold up in the face of the entertainment that is coming?
Sure, maybe we can rewire ourselves to inject fake memories of an entire life well-lived, winters by the warm hearth, homes built by hand, children's clothes sewn, religious services attended, adventures had, and then cheat ourselves to fulfilment that way. But even that is a little sad, when so much of the promise of automated abundance is that finally we can take a step back (with our hopefully longer lifespans) and do all of these things. And yes, I think forcing people to do them is better, and will make them happier, than allowing them to press the pleasure button all day, which the vast majority of people, quite possibly pretty much everyone, will do if you let them and if the button is good enough - which you and I both agree it probably will be.
My preference, by the way, would be for a status hierarchy with a baseline that allows for real wireheaders to do what they do, but which provides superior status and more resources to those who embrace a more fulfilling, communal and meaningful existence, as defined in various but strongly overlapping ways by philosophers going back to Socrates.
Well, shit. Why didn't you say so at the start? Here I was going through your arguments paragraph by paragraph to be hit by this. If you want "softer" forms such as societal disapproval, or exclusion from status hierarchies, I have no beef with that.
I have no problem with a world where people who pursue pro-social, creative, or communal lives are rewarded with higher status. I can even envision a system, like a universal Patreon, where people voluntarily grant portions of their resources to others whose 'work' they admire. What I cannot accept is the state, the provider of the UBI baseline, making those judgments. The baseline must remain unconditional. Your neighbors are free to shun you for wireheading; the government is not.
The rest of my reply was written earlier, I'll leave it in since it expands on my understanding of your thought experiments and objections therein.
You ask if I would be happy, proud, or even indifferent if my son spent his days in a haze of safe, state-sponsored heroin, no threat to anyone, just slowly dissolving into the furniture.
The honest answer is: I would not be happy. I would not be proud. Of course I would care. I would be upset, and I think almost anyone would. But the important part is why. As I grieve, I'd try many different things in an attempt to get him to change his ways. Those would include options like offering support, debate, cutting personal contacts, disinheriting him until he reconsiders and so on.
These are, as far as I'm concerned, legitimate forms of coercion. What I wouldn't do is ask for sweeping legislation against his behavior.
Many children do things that violate the norms and desires of their parents. Pre-marital sex, turning away from church, the occasional bender. Quitting the family job, dropping out of grad school to be a Bohemian layabout. Yet society does not, as a general rule, allow parents to bring about the use of force (at least after adulthood). Not even when such a breach represents immense pain and suffering from the parents.
I will grant that parents have the right to try and use legislation, everyone can vote after all, we hope that consensus establishes sanity. You can vote for your view of the future, and I'll vote for mine. If it gets too abhorrent, I'll vote with my feet.
So I would care, but I would not do everything within my power. Such options would include breaking into his house and taking him away at gunpoint, or paying someone to hack his system, and yes, a general prohibition against drug use or wireheading.
I would be open to at least making falling into such a state by accident immensely difficult or impossible, such an irreversible act might well require informed consent and the signing of strict waivers.
Were I do such a thing, I struggle to find a clean break between pure chemical or electrical stimulation and what most would consider productive or ennobling ways to engage with the world. It's a quantitative, not a qualitative difference in the world to come. Your work - at present - gives meaning and value because it makes a tangible difference. We agree that is unlikely to hold indefinitely.
There is also a quantitative blur here. In a world where baseline labor is mostly obsolete, the difference between heroin, hyper-tailored VR, and a perfectly gamified social platform is often intensity and bandwidth. If you legislate against one flavor of narrow reward, you will spend the next decade chasing reskins. Better to aim at the decision process.
The instinct to care, to want the best for everyone, is laudable. The issue is when your definition of caring and "best" faces earnest disagreement. Would you enjoy it if, out of genuine concern for the fate of your immortal soul, contraception was banned? If a Jihad was called to force you to repent at gunpoint and find solace in the arms of Allah?
Claiming the right to choose for yourself, as far as I'm concerned, necessitates the symmetrical extension of the same right to others. In this scenario, my son is an adult in his right mind. My hands are tied, and I am the one tying them.
You are correct that it possibly represents a philosophical or fundamental values difference. I would hope it doesn't, which is why I'm attempting to show you that there is genuine risk of freedoms you hold dear being taken away from you if you endorse a nanny-state that stops people from spending too much time playing video games.
You are conflating your personal, aesthetic, and empathetic preference for a certain kind of life with a universal moral imperative. My objection is not to your preference. Your vision of a fulfilling post-scarcity life, filled with sports, community, craft, and family, sounds lovely. I might even choose it for myself. My objection is to the word "forced" and to the belief that your empathy grants you the right to make that choice for others.
The majority of people don't do heroin, don't gamble away their money or play so much RDR2 that they lose their jobs. Most adults can be trusted to that extent. I think the odds of my hypothetical son doing something like that is low, and it wouldn't remotely justify the breach of liberty it would take to categorically rule that out.
In general, I wish to treat myself like a trustworthy adult who can make their own choices and live with them. I think that's true for most. Where it's not, say by dint of mental illness or cognitive dysfunction, I'm happy to ask they get treated, including by force. But I don't want to shut down churches because they're a front for wireheading in heaven (one that's making false promises to boot).
You suggest that most people lack the agency to resist a sufficiently advanced dopamine pump. You cite tobacco addiction. This is a fair point, and the behavioral psychologists would call it a problem of akrasia, or executive dysfunction. We see it everywhere. People eat junk food when they want to be healthy, they procrastinate when they want to be productive. I am okay with making it harder to do dumb and personally counterproductive things (along the lines of wait times, waivers and all of that). I am against a "utopia" that only lets me choose among good options, especially when the value of good is not set by me but by committee.
Your proposed solution is a kind of societal pre-commitment strategy, a paternalistic structure that saves us from our own predictable irrationality. You want to remove the button.
I'd rather not build a cage around the button, but to upgrade the person pressing it. Then they can choose for themselves.
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