No rational person (at least no rational person without extremely atypical priorities) “wishes to raise his level of happiness”. Few people think that an ideal state for them to be in would be to be drugged into perfect happiness. This suggestion is basically drugging yourself into happiness without the drugs, but keeping the salient aspect of drugs—namely, that the happiness has no connection with there being a desirable situation in the outside world.
You may be thinking your priorities are more typical than they are. A straight forward utilitarian might think its a reasonable view / goal. There are lots of people out there.
As a more general point rationality doesn’t speak to end goals, it speaks to achieving those goals. See orthogonality hypothesis.
Drugs reduce the amount of concern you have for the real world. Taking greater notice of necessary relationships between observations increases the amount of concern you have for the real world.
No rational person (at least no rational person without extremely atypical priorities) “wishes to raise his level of happiness”. Few people think that an ideal state for them to be in would be to be drugged into perfect happiness. This suggestion is basically drugging yourself into happiness without the drugs, but keeping the salient aspect of drugs—namely, that the happiness has no connection with there being a desirable situation in the outside world.
You may be thinking your priorities are more typical than they are. A straight forward utilitarian might think its a reasonable view / goal. There are lots of people out there.
As a more general point rationality doesn’t speak to end goals, it speaks to achieving those goals. See orthogonality hypothesis.
People who are depressed can quite reasonably want to raise their level of happiness—their baseline is below what makes sense for their situation.
There’s a difference between wanting to raise one’s level of happiness and wanting to raise it as high as possible.
I didn’t mean to imply that a rational person should be willing to pay any possible price to raise his happiness.
Drugs reduce the amount of concern you have for the real world. Taking greater notice of necessary relationships between observations increases the amount of concern you have for the real world.