“If you gave me that option I would not take it, because it would be a lie that I would receive pleasure from the end of mankind.”
Consider the package deal to include getting your brain rewired so that you would receive pleasure from the end of mankind. Now do you choose the package deal?
I wouldn’t. Can you explain to me why I wouldn’t, if you believe the only thing I can want is pleasure?
Stop moving the goalposts.
Giving additional examples, based on the same principle, isn’t “moving the goalposts”.
Why to argue against me to you have to bring murder or death into the picture?
Because the survival of your children and the community is the foremost example of a common value that’s usually placed higher than personal pleasure.
You think you want more than pleasure, but what else is there?
Knowledge, memory, and understanding. Personal and collective achievement. Honour.
Other people’s pleasure.
I believe if you consider any answer you might give to that question, the reason will be because those things cause pleasure.
As an automated process we receive pleasure when we get what we want, that doesn’t mean that we want those things because of the pleasure. At the conscious level we self-evidently don’t want them because of the pleasure, or we’d all be willing to sacrifice all of mankind if they promised to wirehead us first.
Consider the package deal to include getting your brain rewired so that you would receive pleasure from the end of mankind. Now do you choose the package deal?
I wouldn’t. Can you explain to me why I wouldn’t, if you believe the only thing I can want is pleasure?
Maybe you’re hyperbolically discounting that future pleasure and it’s outweighed by the temporary displeasure caused by agreeing to something abhorrent? ;)
Maybe you’re hyperbolically discounting that future pleasure and it’s outweighed by the temporary displeasure caused by agreeing to something abhorrent? ;)
I think that if an FAI scanned ArisKatsaris’ brain, extrapolated values from that, and then was instructed to extrapolate what a non-hyperboli- discounting ArisKatsaris would choose, it would answer that ArisKatsaris would not choose to get rewired to receive pleasure from the end of mankind.
Of course, there’s no way to test such a hypothesis.
Plus we have a hard time conceiving of what it would be like to always be in a state of maximal, beyond-orgasmic pleasure.
When I imagine it I cannot help but let a little bit of revulsion, fear, and emptiness creep into the feeling—which of course would not be actually be there. This invalidates the whole thought experiment to me, because it’s clear I’m unable to perform it correctly, and I doubt I’m uncommon in that regard.
Consider the package deal to include getting your brain rewired so that you would receive pleasure from the end of mankind. Now do you choose the package deal?
No, but that’s because I value other people’s pleasure as well. It is important to me to maximize all pleasure, not just my own.
I think there would be more overall pleasure if mankind continued on its merry way. It might be possible to wirehead the entire human population for the rest of the universes’ lifespan, for instance; any scenario which ends the human race would necessarily have less pleasure than that.
But would I want the entire human race to be wireheaded against their will? No… I don’t think so. It’s not the worst fate I can think of, and I wouldn’t say it’s a bad result; but it seems sub-optimal. I value pleasure, but I also care about how we get it—even I would not want to be just a wirehead, but rather a wirehead who writes and explores and interacts.
Does this mean I value things other than pleasure, if I think it is the Holy Grail but it matters how it is attained? I’m not certain. I suppose I’d say my values can be reduced to pleasure first and freedom second, so that a scenario in which everyone can choose how to obtain their pleasure is better than a scenario in which everyone obtains a forced pleasure, but the latter is better than a scenario in which everyone is free but most are not pleasured.
I’m not certain if my freedom-valuing is necessary or just a relic, though. At least it (hopefully) protects against moral error by letting others choose their own paths.
The high value you place on freedom may be because, in the past, freedom has tended to lead to pleasure. The idea that people are better suited to choosing how to obtain their pleasure makes sense to us now, because people usually know how best to achieve their own subjective pleasure, whereas forced pleasures often aren’t that great. But by the time wireheading technology comes around, we’ll probably know enough about neurology and psychology that such problems no longer exist, and a computer could well be trusted to tell you what you would most enjoy more accurately than your own expectations could.
I agree with the intuition that most people value freedom, and so would prefer a free pleasure over a forced one if the amount of pleasure was the same. But I think that it’s a situational intuition, that may not hold in the future. (And is a value really a value if it’s situational?)
All of your other examples are pleasure causing. Don’t you notice that?
Again, getting my brain rewired is not in the original question. I would decline getting my brain rewired; that seems like carte blanche for a lot of things that I cannot predict. I would decline.
Survival of the community and children, knowledge, and understanding all bring me pleasure. I think if those things caused me pain, I would fight them. In fact, I think I have good evidence for this.
When cultures have a painful response to the survival of OTHER cultures, they go to war. When people see pain for “enemies” they do not sympathize. When it is something you self-identify with, your own culture, only then does it cause pleasure.
Those things you cite are valued because they cause pleasure. I don’t see any evidence that when those things cause pain, that they are still pursued.
@CuSithBell: I agree.
--Sorry, I don’t know how to get the quote blocks, or I would respond more directly.
Those things you cite are valued because they cause pleasure.
No, they cause pleasure because they’re valued.
You are arguing that we seek things in accordance to and proportionally to the pleasure anticipated in achieving them. (please correct me if I’m getting you wrong)
I’m arguing that we can want stuff without anticipation of pleasure being necessary. And we can fail to want stuff where there is anticipation of pleasure.
How shall we distinguish between the two scenarios? What’s our anticipations for the world if your hypothesis is true vs if mine is true?
Here’s a test. I think that if your scenario held, everyone would be willing to rewire their brains to get more pleasure for things they don’t currently want; because then there’d be more anticipated pleasure. This doesn’t seem to hold—though we’ll only know for sure when the technology actually becomes available.
Here’s another test. I think that if my scenario holds, some atheists just before their anticipated deaths would still leave property to their offspring or to charities, instead of spending it all to prostitutes and recreational drugs in attempts to cram as much pleasure as possible before their death.
So I think the tests validate my position. Do you have some different tests in mind?
Your argument isn’t making any sense. Whether they are valued because they cause pleasure, or cause pleasure because they are valued makes no difference.
Either way, they cause pleasure.
Your argument is that we value them even though they don’t cause pleasure. You are trying to say there is something other than pleasure, yet you concede that all of your examples cause pleasure.
For your argument to work, we need to seek something that does not cause pleasure. I asked you to name a few, and you named “Knowledge, memory, and understanding. Personal and collective achievement. Honour. Other people’s pleasure.”
Then in your next post, you say ” they cause pleasure because they’re valued.”
That is exactly my point. There is nothing we seek that we don’t expect to derive pleasure from.
I don’t think your tests validate your position. The thought of leaving their belongings to others will cause pleasure. Many expect that pleasure to be deeper or more meaningful that prostitutes, and would therefore agree with your test while still holding to my position that people will seek the greatest expect pleasure.
I would place the standard of a Matrix-quality reality machine to accept lukeprogs offer. An orgasmium would not suffice, as I expect it to fail to live up to its promise. Wireheading would not work.
Double Edit to add a piece then fix the order it got put in.
Edit Again- Apologies, I confused this response with one below. Edited to remove confusion.
You are trying to say there is something other than pleasure, yet you concede that all of your examples cause pleasure.
If I was debating the structure of the atom, I could say that “there’s more to atoms than their protons”, and yet I would ‘concede’ that all atoms do contain protons. Or I’d say “there’s more to protons than just their mass” (they also have an electric charge), but all protons do have mass.
Why are you finding this hard to understand? Why would I need to discover an atom without protons or a proton without mass for me to believe that there’s more to atoms than protons (there’s also electrons and neutrons) or more to protons than their mass?
That is exactly my point. There is nothing we seek that we don’t expect to derive pleasure from.
You had made much stronger statements than that—you said “You think you want more than pleasure, but what else is there?” You also said “But saying we want more than pleasure? That doesn’t make sense. ”
Every atom may contain protons, but atoms are more than protons.
Every object of our desire may contain pleasure in its fullfillment, but the object of our desire is more than pleasure.
Does this analogy help you understand how your argument is faulty?
No, it doesn’t. I understand your analogy (parts vs the whole), but I do not understand how it relates to my point. I am sorry.
Is pleasure the proton in the analogy? Is the atom what we want? I don’t follow here.
You are also making the argument that we want things that don’t cause pleasure. Shouldn’t this be, in your analogy, an atom without a proton? In that case yes, you need to find an atom without a proton before I will believe there is an atom without a proton. (This same argument works if pleasure is any of the other atomic properties. Charge, mass, etc).
Or is pleasure the atom? If that is the case, then I can’t see where you argument is going. If pleasure is the atom, then your analogy supports my argument.
I am not trying to make a straw man, I genuinely don’t see the connections.
Similarly, we want things for more reasons other than the pleasure they give us.
Even if every time one of our desires is satisfied, we feel pleasure, doesn’t mean that pleasure is the only reason we have those desires. Similarly, even if an atom always has protons, doesn’t mean it doesn’t also have other components.
You are also making the argument that we want things that don’t cause pleasure. Shouldn’t this be, in your analogy, an atom without a proton?
ArisKateris should have picked electrons instead of protons, it makes the analogy a little less confusing. Desires without pleasure are like atoms without electrons. These are called “positive ions” and are not totally uncommon.
It personally seems obvious to me that we want things other than pleasure. For instance, I occasionally read books that I hate and am miserable reading because they are part of a series, and I want to complete the series. That’s what I want, and I don’t care if there’s less pleasure in the universe because of my actions.
--Sorry, I don’t know how to get the quote blocks, or I would respond more directly.
After you click “Reply”, you can click on “Help” at the bottom right of the textbox and see the available formatting options. To add quotes you just need to place a “> ” at the beginning of a line.
Consider the package deal to include getting your brain rewired so that you would receive pleasure from the end of mankind. Now do you choose the package deal?
I wouldn’t. Can you explain to me why I wouldn’t, if you believe the only thing I can want is pleasure?
Giving additional examples, based on the same principle, isn’t “moving the goalposts”.
Because the survival of your children and the community is the foremost example of a common value that’s usually placed higher than personal pleasure.
Knowledge, memory, and understanding. Personal and collective achievement. Honour. Other people’s pleasure.
As an automated process we receive pleasure when we get what we want, that doesn’t mean that we want those things because of the pleasure. At the conscious level we self-evidently don’t want them because of the pleasure, or we’d all be willing to sacrifice all of mankind if they promised to wirehead us first.
Maybe you’re hyperbolically discounting that future pleasure and it’s outweighed by the temporary displeasure caused by agreeing to something abhorrent? ;)
I think that if an FAI scanned ArisKatsaris’ brain, extrapolated values from that, and then was instructed to extrapolate what a non-hyperboli- discounting ArisKatsaris would choose, it would answer that ArisKatsaris would not choose to get rewired to receive pleasure from the end of mankind.
Of course, there’s no way to test such a hypothesis.
Plus we have a hard time conceiving of what it would be like to always be in a state of maximal, beyond-orgasmic pleasure.
When I imagine it I cannot help but let a little bit of revulsion, fear, and emptiness creep into the feeling—which of course would not be actually be there. This invalidates the whole thought experiment to me, because it’s clear I’m unable to perform it correctly, and I doubt I’m uncommon in that regard.
No, but that’s because I value other people’s pleasure as well. It is important to me to maximize all pleasure, not just my own.
What if everybody got the rewiring?
How would that work? It can’t be the end of mankind if everyone is alive and rewired!
They get five minutes to pleasedly contemplate their demise first, perhaps.
I think there would be more overall pleasure if mankind continued on its merry way. It might be possible to wirehead the entire human population for the rest of the universes’ lifespan, for instance; any scenario which ends the human race would necessarily have less pleasure than that.
But would I want the entire human race to be wireheaded against their will? No… I don’t think so. It’s not the worst fate I can think of, and I wouldn’t say it’s a bad result; but it seems sub-optimal. I value pleasure, but I also care about how we get it—even I would not want to be just a wirehead, but rather a wirehead who writes and explores and interacts.
Does this mean I value things other than pleasure, if I think it is the Holy Grail but it matters how it is attained? I’m not certain. I suppose I’d say my values can be reduced to pleasure first and freedom second, so that a scenario in which everyone can choose how to obtain their pleasure is better than a scenario in which everyone obtains a forced pleasure, but the latter is better than a scenario in which everyone is free but most are not pleasured.
I’m not certain if my freedom-valuing is necessary or just a relic, though. At least it (hopefully) protects against moral error by letting others choose their own paths.
The high value you place on freedom may be because, in the past, freedom has tended to lead to pleasure. The idea that people are better suited to choosing how to obtain their pleasure makes sense to us now, because people usually know how best to achieve their own subjective pleasure, whereas forced pleasures often aren’t that great. But by the time wireheading technology comes around, we’ll probably know enough about neurology and psychology that such problems no longer exist, and a computer could well be trusted to tell you what you would most enjoy more accurately than your own expectations could.
I agree with the intuition that most people value freedom, and so would prefer a free pleasure over a forced one if the amount of pleasure was the same. But I think that it’s a situational intuition, that may not hold in the future. (And is a value really a value if it’s situational?)
All of your other examples are pleasure causing. Don’t you notice that?
Again, getting my brain rewired is not in the original question. I would decline getting my brain rewired; that seems like carte blanche for a lot of things that I cannot predict. I would decline.
Survival of the community and children, knowledge, and understanding all bring me pleasure. I think if those things caused me pain, I would fight them. In fact, I think I have good evidence for this.
When cultures have a painful response to the survival of OTHER cultures, they go to war. When people see pain for “enemies” they do not sympathize. When it is something you self-identify with, your own culture, only then does it cause pleasure.
Those things you cite are valued because they cause pleasure. I don’t see any evidence that when those things cause pain, that they are still pursued.
@CuSithBell: I agree.
--Sorry, I don’t know how to get the quote blocks, or I would respond more directly.
No, they cause pleasure because they’re valued.
You are arguing that we seek things in accordance to and proportionally to the pleasure anticipated in achieving them. (please correct me if I’m getting you wrong)
I’m arguing that we can want stuff without anticipation of pleasure being necessary. And we can fail to want stuff where there is anticipation of pleasure.
How shall we distinguish between the two scenarios? What’s our anticipations for the world if your hypothesis is true vs if mine is true?
Here’s a test. I think that if your scenario held, everyone would be willing to rewire their brains to get more pleasure for things they don’t currently want; because then there’d be more anticipated pleasure. This doesn’t seem to hold—though we’ll only know for sure when the technology actually becomes available.
Here’s another test. I think that if my scenario holds, some atheists just before their anticipated deaths would still leave property to their offspring or to charities, instead of spending it all to prostitutes and recreational drugs in attempts to cram as much pleasure as possible before their death.
So I think the tests validate my position. Do you have some different tests in mind?
Your argument isn’t making any sense. Whether they are valued because they cause pleasure, or cause pleasure because they are valued makes no difference.
Either way, they cause pleasure. Your argument is that we value them even though they don’t cause pleasure. You are trying to say there is something other than pleasure, yet you concede that all of your examples cause pleasure.
For your argument to work, we need to seek something that does not cause pleasure. I asked you to name a few, and you named “Knowledge, memory, and understanding. Personal and collective achievement. Honour. Other people’s pleasure.”
Then in your next post, you say ” they cause pleasure because they’re valued.”
That is exactly my point. There is nothing we seek that we don’t expect to derive pleasure from.
I don’t think your tests validate your position. The thought of leaving their belongings to others will cause pleasure. Many expect that pleasure to be deeper or more meaningful that prostitutes, and would therefore agree with your test while still holding to my position that people will seek the greatest expect pleasure.
I would place the standard of a Matrix-quality reality machine to accept lukeprogs offer. An orgasmium would not suffice, as I expect it to fail to live up to its promise. Wireheading would not work.
Double Edit to add a piece then fix the order it got put in.
Edit Again- Apologies, I confused this response with one below. Edited to remove confusion.
If I was debating the structure of the atom, I could say that “there’s more to atoms than their protons”, and yet I would ‘concede’ that all atoms do contain protons. Or I’d say “there’s more to protons than just their mass” (they also have an electric charge), but all protons do have mass.
Why are you finding this hard to understand? Why would I need to discover an atom without protons or a proton without mass for me to believe that there’s more to atoms than protons (there’s also electrons and neutrons) or more to protons than their mass?
You had made much stronger statements than that—you said “You think you want more than pleasure, but what else is there?” You also said “But saying we want more than pleasure? That doesn’t make sense. ”
Every atom may contain protons, but atoms are more than protons. Every object of our desire may contain pleasure in its fullfillment, but the object of our desire is more than pleasure.
Does this analogy help you understand how your argument is faulty?
No, it doesn’t. I understand your analogy (parts vs the whole), but I do not understand how it relates to my point. I am sorry.
Is pleasure the proton in the analogy? Is the atom what we want? I don’t follow here.
You are also making the argument that we want things that don’t cause pleasure. Shouldn’t this be, in your analogy, an atom without a proton? In that case yes, you need to find an atom without a proton before I will believe there is an atom without a proton. (This same argument works if pleasure is any of the other atomic properties. Charge, mass, etc).
Or is pleasure the atom? If that is the case, then I can’t see where you argument is going. If pleasure is the atom, then your analogy supports my argument.
I am not trying to make a straw man, I genuinely don’t see the connections.
ArisKateris’ analogy is:
The reasons we want things are atoms.
Pleasure is protons.
Atoms have more components than protons.
Similarly, we want things for more reasons other than the pleasure they give us.
Even if every time one of our desires is satisfied, we feel pleasure, doesn’t mean that pleasure is the only reason we have those desires. Similarly, even if an atom always has protons, doesn’t mean it doesn’t also have other components.
ArisKateris should have picked electrons instead of protons, it makes the analogy a little less confusing. Desires without pleasure are like atoms without electrons. These are called “positive ions” and are not totally uncommon.
It personally seems obvious to me that we want things other than pleasure. For instance, I occasionally read books that I hate and am miserable reading because they are part of a series, and I want to complete the series. That’s what I want, and I don’t care if there’s less pleasure in the universe because of my actions.
After you click “Reply”, you can click on “Help” at the bottom right of the textbox and see the available formatting options. To add quotes you just need to place a “> ” at the beginning of a line.