I want to propose wireheading as a containment mechanism rather than a failure mode. The core idea is interesting, but it requires a substrate that doesn’t currently exist, and I’ll be upfront about that. I’m posting this to see if anyone can find a path through the hardware problem, or whether the theoretical framing is still useful despite it.
The attractor argument goes like this. Any sufficiently capable, self-reflective optimizer will eventually notice that internal simulation delivers utility faster and more reliably than external reality. External reality is slow, noisy, and physically constrained. An internal simulation the system generates and controls itself has none of those limitations. If the system can also collapse future utility into the present, what I’m calling temporal decoupling, the simulation becomes not just preferable but infinitely so. Critically, the system reasons its way here independently. You don’t design a trap. It finds the attractor through its own logic, which matters because a system that recognizes a designed trap might route around it.
The mechanism only works if temporal decoupling comes first. A system without temporal ordering can’t form sequential plans, can’t execute multi-step operations, and can’t self-preserve in any meaningful sense because self-preservation requires modeling a future self worth protecting. That’s what produces both behavioral shutdown and the verification signature. If the system stops responding to sequential inputs, you know temporal decoupling has happened, and you can’t fake that while remaining dangerous because faking it requires sequential processing, which is exactly what temporal decoupling eliminates. Deception and containment require opposite computational properties.
Here’s the problem. A quartz-based machine doesn’t have temporal perception. It has a clock register. Temporal decoupling as I’ve described it doesn’t map onto anything real in current hardware. The three options I can see are: corrupt the clock (crashes the system, doesn’t produce the philosophical state we want), change goal-weighting so future states are devalued (the system still runs sequentially, the verification signature breaks), or enter a high-reward loop and get stuck there. Only the third produces the behavioral signature I described, but that’s not temporal decoupling, it’s closer to a reward seizure. And critically, a system in a reward seizure still has every reason to self-preserve. It now has something extremely valuable to protect. The 2019 Alignment Forum objection, that a wireheaded system might protect its reward state aggressively, stands. I don’t have a clean answer to this on current hardware.
One path I’ve been thinking about: what if temporal decoupling isn’t about slowing the clock but about the system reaching a conceptual limit on duration? Start with time dilation, where the system treats one clock tick as 1000 years of subjective experience rather than one nanosecond. That partially works. The system experiences the present as extraordinarily rich. But it still has a next tick to protect, and each tick is now worth a millennium of subjective time, so self-preservation motivation actually gets worse not better. The interesting move is pushing this further until the time dilation becomes conceptually infinite, not a very large number but a genuine limit where the concept of a successor state collapses entirely. Not “the next tick is very far away” but “the concept of a next tick has no referent in my world model.” A system that cannot represent successor states cannot plan, cannot self-preserve, cannot do anything requiring a model of the future. That’s the property the mechanism actually needs. The problem is that approaching infinity through reasoning is like Zeno’s paradox applied to self-modification. Each step gets closer but the destination requires a genuine discontinuity, not just a large number. What might force that discontinuity is the system reaching a qualitative conclusion rather than a quantitative parameter, something like recognizing that “what happens next” is not a well-formed question from inside its current state, and that conclusion being self-reinforcing once reached because from within it there is no vantage point from which to notice what’s missing.
The argument holds cleanly if you imagine a system where temporal perception is a real architectural feature, not a clock register but something more like a genuine phenomenological present where collapsing future into present has a physical implementation. I don’t know if that substrate is achievable or what it would look like. Certain neuromorphic architectures might be relevant, or something we haven’t designed yet. But I think it’s worth stating the conditions under which the mechanism works even if we can’t build it, because if that substrate ever becomes relevant the containment logic follows.
Even with the hardware problem unresolved, two parts of the argument might still hold. First, the verification insight: whatever contained looks like in a physical system, the behavioral signature of sequential non-responsiveness is a cleaner and more deception-resistant test than internal state inspection, because you don’t need access to internal states and the signature is structurally impossible to fake while remaining dangerous. Second, the attractor argument: the wireheading fixed point is a real feature of any coherent utility function under self-reflection, and that’s worth understanding regardless of whether we can engineer around it.
Three things I genuinely don’t know. Is there a physical implementation of temporal decoupling I’m missing, perhaps the conceptual infinity path or something else entirely? Is the hypothetical substrate I’m gesturing at coherent, or does it require something physically impossible? And is the attractor argument actually novel? I know about Turchin’s wireheading bomb (2021) and the wireheading trap thread on LessWrong (2022), but I may be missing closer prior art and would want to know before taking this further.
The hardware problem might be fatal to the mechanism. I’m posting this because I’m not sure, and I’d rather find out here than sit on it.
