I read that and similar articles. I deliberately didn’t say pleasure or happiness, but “reduced to good and bad feelings”, including other feelings that might be deemed good, such as love, curiosity, self-esteem, meaningfulness..., and including the present and the future. The part about the future includes any instrumental actions in the present which be taken with the intention of obtaining good feelings in the future, for oneself or for others.
This should cover visiting Costa Rica, having good sex, and helping loved ones succeed, which are the examples given in that essay against the simple example of Nozick’s experience machine. The experience machine is intuitively deemed bad because it precludes acting in order to instrumentally increase good feelings in the future and prevent bad feelings of oneself or others, and because pleasure is not what good feelings are all about. It is a very narrow part of the whole spectrum of good experiences one can have, precluding many others mentioned, and this makes it aversive.
The part about wanting and liking has neurological interest and has been well researched. It is not relevant for this question, because values need not correspond with wanting, they can just correspond with liking. Immediate liking is value, wanting is often mistaken. We want things which are evolutionarily or culturally caused, but that are not good for us. Wanting is like an empty promise, while liking can be empirically and directly verified to be good.
Any valid values reduce to good and bad feelings, for oneself or for others, in the present or in the future. This can be said of survival, learning, working, loving, protecting, sight-seeing, etc.
I say it again, I dare Eliezer (or others) to defend and justify a value that cannot be reduced to good and bad feelings.
I want to know more about the future. I do not expect to make much use of the information, and the tiny good feeling I expect to get when I am proven right is far smaller than the good feelings I could get from other uses of my time. My defence for this value as legitimate is that I am quite capable of rational reasoning and hearing out any and all of your arguments, and yet I am also quite certain that neither you nor others will be able to persuade me to abandon it. No further justification or defence beyond that is necessary or possible, in my opinion.
I read that and similar articles. I deliberately didn’t say pleasure or happiness, but “reduced to good and bad feelings”, including other feelings that might be deemed good, such as love, curiosity, self-esteem, meaningfulness..., and including the present and the future. The part about the future includes any instrumental actions in the present which be taken with the intention of obtaining good feelings in the future, for oneself or for others.
This should cover visiting Costa Rica, having good sex, and helping loved ones succeed, which are the examples given in that essay against the simple example of Nozick’s experience machine. The experience machine is intuitively deemed bad because it precludes acting in order to instrumentally increase good feelings in the future and prevent bad feelings of oneself or others, and because pleasure is not what good feelings are all about. It is a very narrow part of the whole spectrum of good experiences one can have, precluding many others mentioned, and this makes it aversive.
The part about wanting and liking has neurological interest and has been well researched. It is not relevant for this question, because values need not correspond with wanting, they can just correspond with liking. Immediate liking is value, wanting is often mistaken. We want things which are evolutionarily or culturally caused, but that are not good for us. Wanting is like an empty promise, while liking can be empirically and directly verified to be good.
Any valid values reduce to good and bad feelings, for oneself or for others, in the present or in the future. This can be said of survival, learning, working, loving, protecting, sight-seeing, etc.
I say it again, I dare Eliezer (or others) to defend and justify a value that cannot be reduced to good and bad feelings.
I want to know more about the future. I do not expect to make much use of the information, and the tiny good feeling I expect to get when I am proven right is far smaller than the good feelings I could get from other uses of my time. My defence for this value as legitimate is that I am quite capable of rational reasoning and hearing out any and all of your arguments, and yet I am also quite certain that neither you nor others will be able to persuade me to abandon it. No further justification or defence beyond that is necessary or possible, in my opinion.