Pleasure, or the absence of pain (and the relative importances of these two drives depends on your personality). Pleasure and pain are the bedrock you’re looking for. They’re unmistakable experiences that are motivating in and of themselves. They are motivation itself.
Every course of action you can take will give you a different net return (in pleasure or the absence of pain) over the course of your life. If you’re conscientious about long-term planning and making good predictions, you can come closer to maximizing this ultimate metric.
“Pleasure” is a bit of an aether variable here though because if we start trying to drill down we’ll wind up with multiple dimensions of pleasure which will just start recapitulating values talk with some new variable names. I agree in the pragmatic sense that usually such existential crisis are a result of losing touch with basic pleasures either acutely or chronically (and things coming to a head via some catalyzing event).
It sounds like for OP, some “values talk” is due. OP seems to be wondering how to weigh multiple values, and I’m saying weigh them according to how much pleasure can be derived from their indulgence. I don’t really see “multiple dimensions of pleasure,” I see many different paths to pleasure that are all commensurable.
I’d argue that they inevitably are the ultimate metric, and all we can do about it is become more conscious of that and pursue them more intentionally.
It means we’ll get better at predicting the net return in pleasure of different choices. And especially, we’ll become more aware of long-term consequences (because our system 1 is often biased toward short-term pleasures, which is liable to reduce total net lifetime pleasure).
We verify this process by taking stock of the amount and degree of regret we feel. By “regret” here I mean whenever you wish you could go back in time and choose differently.
“for what metric does this goal score well on?”
Pleasure, or the absence of pain (and the relative importances of these two drives depends on your personality). Pleasure and pain are the bedrock you’re looking for. They’re unmistakable experiences that are motivating in and of themselves. They are motivation itself.
Every course of action you can take will give you a different net return (in pleasure or the absence of pain) over the course of your life. If you’re conscientious about long-term planning and making good predictions, you can come closer to maximizing this ultimate metric.
“Pleasure” is a bit of an aether variable here though because if we start trying to drill down we’ll wind up with multiple dimensions of pleasure which will just start recapitulating values talk with some new variable names. I agree in the pragmatic sense that usually such existential crisis are a result of losing touch with basic pleasures either acutely or chronically (and things coming to a head via some catalyzing event).
It sounds like for OP, some “values talk” is due. OP seems to be wondering how to weigh multiple values, and I’m saying weigh them according to how much pleasure can be derived from their indulgence. I don’t really see “multiple dimensions of pleasure,” I see many different paths to pleasure that are all commensurable.
I like the “how to weigh multiple values” frame.
But to use the initial argument in the post, why should pleasure and pain be the ultimate metric?
I’d argue that they inevitably are the ultimate metric, and all we can do about it is become more conscious of that and pursue them more intentionally.
But how do you verify that? What does it mean (to you) to become more conscious of it?
It means we’ll get better at predicting the net return in pleasure of different choices. And especially, we’ll become more aware of long-term consequences (because our system 1 is often biased toward short-term pleasures, which is liable to reduce total net lifetime pleasure).
We verify this process by taking stock of the amount and degree of regret we feel. By “regret” here I mean whenever you wish you could go back in time and choose differently.