I think you can confuse yourself by treating utility too literally as a scalar quantity. I won’t argue (here) against interpersonal comparisons, but I will point out that we have a lot of evidence that even people who report lots of pain and suffering and almost no pleasure do not usually commit suicide, nor advise it to younger people when they’re later in life.
This implies pretty strongly that most people’s self-evaluation of their life is NOT a sum of their individual moments.
The topic of hedonic adaptation and the fact that some kinds of memories fade faster than others is another difficulty in the evaluation of retrospective value of living. Individual self-evaluations of a point-in-time change over time—how much it hurts now is simply different from how much I remember it hurting tomorrow. Which value do you use in your sum?
I think you can confuse yourself by treating utility too literally as a scalar quantity. I won’t argue (here) against interpersonal comparisons, but I will point out that we have a lot of evidence that even people who report lots of pain and suffering and almost no pleasure do not usually commit suicide, nor advise it to younger people when they’re later in life.
This implies pretty strongly that most people’s self-evaluation of their life is NOT a sum of their individual moments.
The topic of hedonic adaptation and the fact that some kinds of memories fade faster than others is another difficulty in the evaluation of retrospective value of living. Individual self-evaluations of a point-in-time change over time—how much it hurts now is simply different from how much I remember it hurting tomorrow. Which value do you use in your sum?