What have you read about it that has caused you to stop considering it, or to overlook it from the start?
I reject impartiality on the grounds that I’m a personal identity and therefore not impartial. The utility of others is not my utility, therefore I am not a utilitarian. I reject unconditional altruism in general for this reason. It amazes me in hindsight that I was ever dumb enough to think otherwise.
Can you teach me how to see positive states as terminally (and not just instrumentally) valuable, if I currently don’t?
Teach, no, but there are some intuitions that can be evoked. I’d personally take a 10:1 ratio between pleasure and pain; if I get 10 times more pleasure out of something, I’ll take any pain as a cost. It’s just usually not realistic, which is why I don’t agree that life has generally positive value.
There are fictional descriptions of extreme pleasure enhancement and wireheading, e.g. in fantasy that describe worthwhile states of experience. The EA movement is fighting against wireheading, as you can see in avturchin’s posts. But I think such a combination of enhancement + wireheading could plausibly come closest to delivering net-positive value of life, if it could be invented (although I don’t expect it in my lifetime, so it’s only theoretical). Here’s an example from fiction:
“You see, I have a very special spell called the Glow. It looks like this.” The mage flicked his fingers and they started Glowing in a warm, radiant light. Little Joanna looked at them in awe. “It’s so pretty! Can you teach me that? Is that the reward?” Melchias laughed. “No. The true reward happens when I touch you with it.” She stared at him curiously. He looked down at the table in front of him with an expectant look, and she put her slender arm there so he could touch her. “Here, let me demonstrate. Now, this won’t hurt one bit...” He reached out with his Glowing fingers to touch the back of her small hand, ever so gently.
And as their skin connected, Joanna’s entire world exploded. The experience was indescribable. Nothing, no words and no warnings, could have prepared Joanna for the feeling that was now blasting through her young mind with the screaming ferocity of a white-hot firestorm, ripping her conscious thoughts apart like a small, flickering candlelight in a gigantic hurricane of whipping flames and shredding embers. She had no idea, no idea such pleasure existed, ever could exist! It was all of her happy memories, all of her laughter, her playfulness, her sexy tingles when she rubbed herself between the legs, the goodness of eating apple pie, the warmth of the fireplace in the winter nights, the love in her papa’s strong arms, the fun of her games and friendships with the other village kids, the excitement of stories yet unheard, the exhilaration of running under the summer sun, the fascination of the nature and the animals around her, the smells and the tastes, the hugs and awkward kisses, all the goodness of all her young life, all condensed into a mere thousandth of a split-second… …and amplified a thousand-fold… …and shot through her mind, through her soul, again and again and again, split-second after split-second after split-second, like a bombardment of one supernova after another supernova of pure, unimaginable bliss, again and again and again, and yet again, second after second, filling her up, ripping her apart with raw ecstatic brilliance, melting her mind together in a new form, widened and brighter than it had ever been, a new, divine, god-like Joanna that no words could adequately worship, only to rip her apart again with a new fiery pulse of condensed, sizzling-hot vibrance, indescribable, unimaginable, each second an unreached peak, a new high, a new universe of fantastic pleasure, a new, unspeakably wonderful Joanna, loved and pulsing in her own Glowing light with a beauty unmatched by any other thing in all of the World Tree. She was a giant beating heart that was also a Goddess, Glowing and pulsing in the center of Everything, Glowing with the certainty of absolute affirmation, the purity of absolute perfection, the undeniability of absolute goodness. She spent centuries in seconds, serene yet in screaming ecstasy, non-living yet pulsing raw life force, non-personal yet always Joanna, Joanna in divine totality. It took Joanna a long time to realize she was still breathing, a living child with an actual human body. She had forgotton to breathe, and was sure she would have suffocated by now, but somehow, inexplicably, her body had remembered to keep itself alive without her. Master Melchias had lied: It did hurt, her chin and lip hurt, but the young girl found it was only because she had dropped to the hard stone floor in helpless twitching convulsions, and she had accidentally bitten herself. As promised by the wizard, the small wound was quickly healing. Joanna couldn’t get up yet. She had no idea how much time had passed, but she just couldn’t move or even open her young eyes yet. She curled up into a fetal position on the cold, hard floor of Melchias’ Tower and sobbed uncontrollably. She sobbed and cried, and sobbed, and laughed madly, then sobbed and cried again. They were tears of pure joy.
The Glow wasn’t just a normal pleasure spike, like an orgasm, a fit of laughter or a drug high. It went far, far beyond that. Normal human experiences existed within an intensity range that was given by nature. It served to motivate the organism for survival and reproduction, but it was not optimized for the experience itself. Even the most intense experiences, like burning alive or being skinned alive, existed within that ordinary, natural range. But the magic of the Glow didn’t just stimulate pleasure within that range—it completely changed the range itself. It broke the scale on which normal experiences were measured, and then attached a vast multitude of additional ones to its top. By enhancing the part of the subject’s mind that contained ordinary pleasure, it became temporarily able to experience an intensity that was hundreds of thousands times stronger than even the most extreme natural human feeling. Being drowned in hot oil, being flayed alive or tortured with needles, deep romantic love and fulfillment, orgasmic ecstasy, perfect fits of laughter—all of these human extremes represented only a miniscule fraction of the new potential. And only then did the spell induce raw, optimized pleasure within this new, widened consciousness. The result was an unimaginably pure goodness that fell so far outside of the subject’s prior experience that it couldn’t even be communicated by words. It had to be demonstrated. Once a potential [...] candidate had perceived even one second of the Glow, each containing more joy and happiness than an average human lifespan, with none of its pain, they all became devoted followers to Melchias. He transformed their experience from something human to something divine, and in turn, he became like a god to them.
The utility of others is not my utility, therefore I am not a utilitarian. I reject unconditional altruism in general for this reason.
When I say that I’m a utilitarian (or something utilitarian-ish), I mean something like: If there were no non-obvious bad side-effects — e.g., it doesn’t damage my ability to have ordinary human relationships in a way that ends up burning more value than it creates — I’d take a pill that would bind my future self to be unwilling to sacrifice two strangers to save a friend (or to save myself), all else being equal.
The not-obviously-confused-or-silly version of utilitarianism is “not reflectively endorsing extreme partiality toward yourself or your friends relative to strangers,” rather than “I literally have no goals or preferences or affection for anything other than perfectly unbiased maximization of everyone’s welfare’”.
I reject impartiality on the grounds that I’m a personal identity and therefore not impartial. The utility of others is not my utility, therefore I am not a utilitarian. I reject unconditional altruism in general for this reason. It amazes me in hindsight that I was ever dumb enough to think otherwise.
Teach, no, but there are some intuitions that can be evoked. I’d personally take a 10:1 ratio between pleasure and pain; if I get 10 times more pleasure out of something, I’ll take any pain as a cost. It’s just usually not realistic, which is why I don’t agree that life has generally positive value.
There are fictional descriptions of extreme pleasure enhancement and wireheading, e.g. in fantasy that describe worthwhile states of experience. The EA movement is fighting against wireheading, as you can see in avturchin’s posts. But I think such a combination of enhancement + wireheading could plausibly come closest to delivering net-positive value of life, if it could be invented (although I don’t expect it in my lifetime, so it’s only theoretical). Here’s an example from fiction:
When I say that I’m a utilitarian (or something utilitarian-ish), I mean something like: If there were no non-obvious bad side-effects — e.g., it doesn’t damage my ability to have ordinary human relationships in a way that ends up burning more value than it creates — I’d take a pill that would bind my future self to be unwilling to sacrifice two strangers to save a friend (or to save myself), all else being equal.
The not-obviously-confused-or-silly version of utilitarianism is “not reflectively endorsing extreme partiality toward yourself or your friends relative to strangers,” rather than “I literally have no goals or preferences or affection for anything other than perfectly unbiased maximization of everyone’s welfare’”.