cognitive enhancement, haxxorz, and the pleasure machine

i have been interested for a while now in cognitive enhancement, and why some people find certain forms of enhancement more acceptable than others. for instance, taking beta blockers to calm ones nerves before a concert recital is generally considered ok, whereas taking ritalin before an exam is not. there are several variables that may explain this, and i'm not going to get into each of them, but i think one of the more interesting of these is the perception that certain drugs alter ones essential self more than others. that is to say, the intuition is that the concert pianist is using the drug to allow her "true" ability to shine through, whereas the student is adding something to his "natural" talent that he does not rightfully possess. as a corollary, there are certain abilities that one can and should work towards in order to "deserve" them, and others where popping a pill and circumventing the work is absolutely kosher.

this is a rather cool theory, which brings to mind a number of other thought experiments (e.g. what about genetic enhancement? if you have it in a test tube from birth, is that "cheating" as well?) what i really want to talk about here, though, are haxxorz*. now, i don't play a lot of online games, but enough to know that hax are rife in most of them, and that in a small but significant number of cases are used to break a game entirely. i'll use mario kart wii here as an example, because i've played it a bunch on nintendo wifi, and have used it as a vehicle for similar discussions i've had with the brother and justin. also, you presumably know the point of mario kart wii. it's racing. you know, where you try and go faster than the other guy.

so people have haxed this game in a number of ways, giving themselves infinite items, but also cheating so that their finish time registers as .001 seconds no matter when they actually finish. in other words, no matter what happens, they win, end of story. now, if they did this for the sheer hell of doing it (or, for the lulz, as it were), i could at least understand the psychology behind it, but after careful observation, i've concluded that some people do it because they actually want to win that way. this may seem trivial, but think about a real-world example. if you could take a pill which would allow you to go out tomorrow and win an olympic gold medal in the 100m sprint (but only that, you don't have superhuman speed otherwise), what would it be worth to you (assuming every knew that you took the pill)? the answer, of course, if $0.00. and yet some people spend hours of their time online doing this. i think this constitutes some real and interesting evidence that for some people, the value of winning does not arise from the presence of competition. i would like to find these people and stick them in a scanner asap.

final thought experiment, which you may have heard of: you can hook yourself up to a pleasure machine, in which for the rest of your (real) life you live out a simulation of a perfectly ideal and pleasurable existence: would you do it? for all the same reasons mentioned above, most people perceive this as "cheating", and would not. you may feel that way too. i'm not so sure, though -- authenticity seems at least somewhat overrated, and for all you know, we're in the matrix already, in which case, the joke's really on you if you don't plug in and go enjoy that bottle of scotch.

k. back to real work.


*urban dictionary:

Noun, Plural; a group of people with an unfair advantage over others. Also an insult used in online gaming used against players who possess more skill than the competition. negative conotation.
"F'in n00b HAXXORZ!!!!"
"ZOMG u HAXXORZ no wai!"