But it seems to me you’re trying to get from “there exist emotional changes so disruptive that they effectively kill the person I am” to “we shouldn’t make emotional changes”… which strikes me as abuot as plausible as “there exist physiological changes so disruptive that they effectively kill the person I am” to “we shouldn’t make physiological changes.”
That’s actually really close to what I am saying, but minor alteration.
I’m going from “there exist emotional changes so disruptive that they effectively kill the person I am” to “we probably shouldn’t specifically make the emotional change where change = remove all negative affect. It’s probably one of those changes that effectively kills most people.”
I’m totally down with making some emotional changes, such as “stop clinical depression”, “remove hatred”, etc.
To follow the physiology analogy, “remove all negative affect” seems equivalent to saying “cut the right half of the brain off”. That’s approximately half of human emotion that we’d be removing.
But maybe if we can replace “suffering” with an emotion that we don’t intrinsically hate feeling which ends up producing the same “utility function” (as determined behaviorally), then it’s all good? It’s a lot of changes, but then again my preferences are where I place a large part of my identity, so if they are unaltered then maybe I haven’t died here...
Edit: Can you identify any positive preferences within yourself which do not correspond to a positive emotion? (or negative). I’m currently attempting to do so, nothing yet.
Can you taboo “negative affect”? I was fine with it as shorthand when it was pointing vaguely to an illustrative subset of the space of emotions, but if you mean to define it as a sharp-edged boundary of what we can safely eliminate, it might be helpful to define it more clearly.
Depending on what you mean by the term, I might agree with you that “remove all negative affect” is too big a change.
Can you identify any positive preferences within yourself which do not correspond to a positive emotion?
Well, I feel the emotion of satisfaction when I’m aware of my preferences being satisfied, so a correspondence necessarily exists in those cases. In cases where I’m not aware of my preference being satisfied, I typically don’t experience any differential emotion. E.g., given a choice between people not suffering and my being unaware of people suffering, I prefer the former, although I don’t experience them differently (emotionally or any other way).
That’s actually really close to what I am saying, but minor alteration.
I’m going from “there exist emotional changes so disruptive that they effectively kill the person I am” to “we probably shouldn’t specifically make the emotional change where change = remove all negative affect. It’s probably one of those changes that effectively kills most people.”
I’m totally down with making some emotional changes, such as “stop clinical depression”, “remove hatred”, etc.
To follow the physiology analogy, “remove all negative affect” seems equivalent to saying “cut the right half of the brain off”. That’s approximately half of human emotion that we’d be removing.
But maybe if we can replace “suffering” with an emotion that we don’t intrinsically hate feeling which ends up producing the same “utility function” (as determined behaviorally), then it’s all good? It’s a lot of changes, but then again my preferences are where I place a large part of my identity, so if they are unaltered then maybe I haven’t died here...
Edit: Can you identify any positive preferences within yourself which do not correspond to a positive emotion? (or negative). I’m currently attempting to do so, nothing yet.
Can you taboo “negative affect”? I was fine with it as shorthand when it was pointing vaguely to an illustrative subset of the space of emotions, but if you mean to define it as a sharp-edged boundary of what we can safely eliminate, it might be helpful to define it more clearly.
Depending on what you mean by the term, I might agree with you that “remove all negative affect” is too big a change.
Well, I feel the emotion of satisfaction when I’m aware of my preferences being satisfied, so a correspondence necessarily exists in those cases. In cases where I’m not aware of my preference being satisfied, I typically don’t experience any differential emotion. E.g., given a choice between people not suffering and my being unaware of people suffering, I prefer the former, although I don’t experience them differently (emotionally or any other way).