[eddieone]

Imagining is the easy part if you ask me. What would you do, if you could program your own mind? My first app would probably be some more manual control over the body. Sure would be nice to have a 75 bpm in a stressful situation.

[pas]

More consistency.

If I like something, let's like it more consistently. Let's really eat pizza for 3 days for every meal. So I can order the large one and pop slices into the microwave and enjoy the fuck out of them.

More motivation for progress.

If I decide I want to build a house let's not lose enjoyment after 1 hour of searching the net for floorplans, materials, warehouses, plots of land, and so on.

Also, better [internal] metrics. And naturally better interrupt management. Both internal and external. With better metrics we could see whether what we were doing (and possible what we can do) was (would be) effective/good/useful and how much. And with more efficiency we could reschedule more frequently (not just after we spent a day fiddling with something) so we'd be more effective overall.

And so on.

And probably a lot of these are pretty hackable, as in sprinkle cocaine on that pizza, alaways a bit more the longer it was in the fridge. And probably physiologically it's possible to make a pill that'd give you focus for one hour, we already have a dozen or so ADD/ADHD pills used as attention enhancer nootropics. And we have drugs that alter our view of our own life. Bam, instant feedback on your life. Are we going the right way? Yes, good, keep doing.

Is that too mechanical? Sure, yet sometimes that'd be pretty useful.

And in general, what if you could take a pill to feel in love with someone for 500 days? You get together things are okay, but emotionally something is bothering you a bit, both of you take a pill, and done. Instant good relationship.

The same could go for not getting dragged down by half-hearted relationships.

And that's basic limbic system efficiency, nowhere near mind-hacking. We'd benefit a lot from better pattern matching, better memory (faster, more accurate, etc.), better associations, better theory of mind. A bit of raw working memory, maybe a numeric submodule, something for proper alarms, alerts, better introspection, and so on.

[shanusmagnus]

All of these assume that the conscious "you" knows better about optimizing some meta-objective function than does the limbic "you." Except the latter has been proved out to be species-useful for tens of millions of years, and even more if cross-species evolutionary conservation is considered.

So the interesting question from my PoV is: beyond the immediate reward you hope to enjoy (e.g., loving the pizza as much on day 3 as on the first bite; easy relationships for 500 days) what would the consequences be of these overrides? I'm betting they're all catastrophic, but it's fun to think about the nature of the catastrophe.

[jamii]

> Except the latter has been proved out to be species-useful for tens of millions of years, and even more if cross-species evolutionary conservation is considered.

One of the things that makes humans dominate the planet so thoroughly is that we are programmable, so we can evolve culturally on a scale of decades, instead of genetically on a scale of centuries.

The side effect of this is that that parts of us that aren't programmable are not keeping up with rapidly changing environment eg being both cognitive misers and obese (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4547044/).

It does lead to a neat heuristic though - if some easy change improves intelligent/memory/whatever, it should be expected to have side effects that would have been a poor tradeoff in our ancestral environment, otherwise it would have been selected for already - https://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics

[sn9]

My life would be exponentially better if I could fall asleep at will. Especially if I could wake up no later than some given time interval.

It's the bottleneck to my productivity.