Explanation for why displeasure would be associated with meaningfulness, even though in fact meaning comes from pleasure:
Meaningful experiences involve great pleasure. They also may come with small pains. Part of how you quantify your great pleasure is the size of the small pain that it superceded.
Pain does not cause meaning. It is a test for the magnitude of the pleasure. But only pleasure is a causal factor for meaning.
In a perfect situation, it would be possible to achieve meaningful experiences without pain, but usually it is not possible. A person who optimizes for short-term pain avoidance, will not reach the meaningful experience. Because optimizing for short-term pain avoidance is natural, we have to remind ourselves to overcome this instinct.
This fits with the idea that meaning comes from pleasure, and that great pleasure can be worth a fair amount of pain to achieve. The pain drains meaning away, but the redeeming factor is that it can serve as a test of the magnitude of pleasure, and generate pleasurable stories in the future.
An important counter argument to my hypothesis is how we may find a privileged “high road” to success and pleasure to be less meaningful. This at first might seem to suggest that we do inherently value pain.
In fact, though, what frustrates people about people born with a silver spoon in their mouths is that society seems set up to ensure their pleasure at another’s expense.
It’s not their success or pleasure we dislike. It’s the barriers and pain that we think it’s contextualized in. If pleasure for one means pain for another, then of course we find the pleasure to be less meaningful.
So this isn’t about short-term pain avoidance. It’s about long-term, overall, wise and systemic pursuit of pleasure.
And that pleasure must be not only in the physical experiences we have, but in the stories we tell about it—the way we interpret life. We should look at it, and see that it is good.
If people are wireheading, and we look at that tendency and it causes us great displeasure, that is indeed an argument against wireheading.
We need to understand that there’s no single bucket where pleasure can accumulate. There is a psychological reward system where pleasure is evaluated according to the sensory input and brain state.
Utilitarian hedonism isn’t just about nerve endings. It’s about how we interpret them. If we have a major aesthetic objection to wireheading, that counts from where we’re standing, no matter how much you rachet up the presumed pleasure of wireheading.
The same goes recursively for any “hack” that could justify wireheading. For example, say you posited that wireheading would be seen as morally good, if only we could find a catchy moral justification for it.
So we let our finest AI superintelligences get to work producing one. Indeed, it’s so catchy that the entire human population acquiesces to wireheading.
Well, if we take offense to the prospect of letting the AI superintelligence infect us with a catchy pro-wireheading meme, then that’s a major point against doing so.
In general “It pleases or displeases me to find action X moral” is a valid moral argument—indeed, the only one there is.
The way moral change happens is by making moral arguments or having moral experiences that in themselves are pleasing or displeasing.
What’s needed, then, for moral change to happen, is to find a pleasing way to spread an idea that is itself pleasing to adopt—or unpleasant to abandon. To remain, that idea needs to generate pleasure for the subscriber, or to generate displeasure at the prospect of abandoning it in favor of a competing moral scheme.
To believe in some notion of moral truth or progress requires believing that the psychological reward mechanism we have attached to morality corresponds best with moral schemes that accord with moral truth.
An argument for that is that true ideas are easiest to fashion into a coherent, simple argument. And true ideas best allow us to interface with reality to advantage. Being good tends to make you get along with others better than being bad, and that’s a more pleasant way to exist.
Hence, even though strong cases can be constructed for immoral behavior, truth and goodness will tend to win in the arms race for the most pleasing presentation. So we can enjoy the idea that there is moral progress and objective moral truth, even though we make our moral decisions merely by pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain.
I looked through that post but didn’t see any support for the claim that meaning comes from pleasure.
My own theory is that meaning comes from values, and both pain and pleasure are a way to connect to the things we value, so both are associated with meaning.
I’m a classically trained pianist. Music practice involves at least four kinds of pain:
Loneliness
Frustration
Physical pain
Monotony
I perceive none of these to add meaning to music practice. In fact, it was loneliness, frustration, and monotony that caused my music practice to be slowly drained of its meaning and led me ultimately to stop playing, even though I highly valued my achievements as a classical pianist and music teacher. If there’d been an issue with physical pain, that would have been even worse.
I think what pain can do is add flavor to a story. And we use stories as a way to convey meaning. But in that context, the pain is usually illustrating the pleasures of the experience or of the positive achievement. In the context of my piano career, I was never able to use these forms of pain as a contrast to the pleasures of practice and performance. My performance anxiety was too intense, and so it also was not a source of pleasure.
By contrast, I herded sheep on the Navajo reservation for a month in the middle of winter. That experience generated many stories. Most of them revolve around a source of pain, or a mistake. But that pain or mistake serves to highlight an achievement.
That achievement could be the simple fact of making it through that month while providing a useful service to my host. Or moments of success within it: getting the sheep to drink from the hole I cut in the icy lake, busting a tunnel through the drifts with my body so they could get home, finding a mother sheep that had gotten lost when she was giving birth, not getting cannibalized by a Skinwalker.
Those make for good stories, but there is pleasure in telling those stories. I also have many stories from my life that are painful to tell. Telling them makes me feel drained of meaning.
So I believe that storytelling has the ability to create pleasure out of painful or difficult memories. That is why it feels meaningful: it is pleasurable to tell stories. And being a good storyteller can come with many rewards. The net effect of a painful experience can be positive in the long run if it lends itself to a lot of good storytelling.
Where do values enter the picture?
I think it’s because “values” is a term for the types of stories that give us pleasure. My community gets pleasure out of the stories about my time on the Navajo reservation. They also feel pleasure in my story about getting chased by a bear. I know which of my friends will feel pleasure in my stories from Burning Man, and who will find them uncomfortable.
So once again, “values” is a gloss for the pleasure we take in certain types of stories. Meaning comes from pleasure; it appears to come from values because values also come from pleasure. Meaning can come from pain only indirectly. Pain can generate stories, which generate pleasure in the telling.
“values” is a term for the types of stories that give us pleasure.
It really depends on what you mean by “pleasure”. If pleasure is just “things you want”, then almost tautologically meaning comes from pleasure, since you want meaning.
If instead, pleasure is a particular phenomological feeling similar to feeling happy or content, I think that many of us actually WANT the meaning that comes from living our values, and it also happens to give us pleasure. I think that there are also people that just WANT the pleasure, and if they could get it while ignoring their values, they would.
I call this the”Heaven/Enlightenment” dichotomy, and I think it’s a frequent misunderstanding.
I’ve seen some people say “all we care about is feeling good, and people who think they care about the outside world are confused.” I’ve also seen people say “All we care about is meeting our values, and people who think it’s about feeling good are confused.”
Personally, I think that people are more towards one side of the spectrum or the other along different dimensions, and I’m inclined to believe both sides about their own experience.
I think we can consider pleasure, along with altruism, consistency, rationality, fitting the categorical imperative, and so forth as moral goods.
People have different preferences for how they trade off one against the other when they’re in conflict. But they of course prefer them not to be in conflict.
What I’m interested is not what weights people assign to these values—I agree with you that they are diverse—but on what causes people to adopt any set of preferences at all.
My hypothesis is that it’s pleasure. Or more specifically, whatever moral argument most effectively hijacks an individual person’s psychological reward system.
So if you wanted to understand why another person considers some strange action or belief to be moral, you’d need to understand why the belief system that they hold gives them pleasure.
Some predictions from that hypothesis:
People who find a complex moral argument unpleasant to think about won’t adopt it.
People who find a moral community pleasant to be in will adopt its values.
A moral argument might be very pleasant to understand, rehearse, and think about, and unpleasant to abandon. It might also be unpleasant in the actions it motivates its subscriber to undertake. It will continue to exist in their mind if the balance of pleasure in belief to displeasure in action is favorable.
Deprogramming somebody from a belief system you find abhorrent is best done by giving them alternative sources of “moral pleasure.” Examples of this include the ways people have deprogrammed people from cults and the KKK, by including them in their social gatherings, including Jewish religious dinners, and making them feel welcome. Eventually, the pleasure of adopting the moral system of that shared community displaces whatever pleasure they were deriving from their former belief system.
Paying somebody in money and status to uphold a given belief system is a great way to keep them doing it, no matter how silly it is.
If you want people do do more of a painful but necessary action X, helping them feel compensating forms of moral pleasure is a good way to go about it. Effective Altruism is a great example. By helping people understand how effective donations or direct work can save lives, they give people a feeling of heroism. Its failure mode is making people feel like the demands are impossible, and the displeasure of that disappointment is a primary issue in that community.
Another good way to encourage more of a painful but necessary action X is to teach people how to shape it into a good story that they and others will appreciate in the telling. Hence the story-fication of charity.
Many people don’t give to charity because their community disparages it as “do-gooderism,” as futile, as bragging, or as a tasteless display of wealth and privilege. If you want people to give more to charity, you have to give people a way of being able to enjoy talking about their charitable contributions. One solution is to form a community in which that’s openly accepted and appreciated. Like EA.
Likewise for the rationality community. If you want people to do more good epistemology outside of academia, give them an outlet where that’ll be appreciated and an axis from where it can be spread.
My hypothesis is that it’s pleasure. Or more specifically, whatever moral argument most effectively hijacks an individual person’s psychological reward system.
This just kicks the can down the road on you defining pleasure, all of my points still apply
If instead, pleasure is a particular phenomological feeling similar to feeling happy or content, I think that many of us actually WANT the meaning that comes from living our values, and it also happens to give us pleasure.
That is, I think it’s possible to say that pleasure kicks in around values that we really want, rather than vice versa.
Explanation for why displeasure would be associated with meaningfulness, even though in fact meaning comes from pleasure:
Meaningful experiences involve great pleasure. They also may come with small pains. Part of how you quantify your great pleasure is the size of the small pain that it superceded.
Pain does not cause meaning. It is a test for the magnitude of the pleasure. But only pleasure is a causal factor for meaning.
In a perfect situation, it would be possible to achieve meaningful experiences without pain, but usually it is not possible. A person who optimizes for short-term pain avoidance, will not reach the meaningful experience. Because optimizing for short-term pain avoidance is natural, we have to remind ourselves to overcome this instinct.
This fits with the idea that meaning comes from pleasure, and that great pleasure can be worth a fair amount of pain to achieve. The pain drains meaning away, but the redeeming factor is that it can serve as a test of the magnitude of pleasure, and generate pleasurable stories in the future.
An important counter argument to my hypothesis is how we may find a privileged “high road” to success and pleasure to be less meaningful. This at first might seem to suggest that we do inherently value pain.
In fact, though, what frustrates people about people born with a silver spoon in their mouths is that society seems set up to ensure their pleasure at another’s expense.
It’s not their success or pleasure we dislike. It’s the barriers and pain that we think it’s contextualized in. If pleasure for one means pain for another, then of course we find the pleasure to be less meaningful.
So this isn’t about short-term pain avoidance. It’s about long-term, overall, wise and systemic pursuit of pleasure.
And that pleasure must be not only in the physical experiences we have, but in the stories we tell about it—the way we interpret life. We should look at it, and see that it is good.
If people are wireheading, and we look at that tendency and it causes us great displeasure, that is indeed an argument against wireheading.
We need to understand that there’s no single bucket where pleasure can accumulate. There is a psychological reward system where pleasure is evaluated according to the sensory input and brain state.
Utilitarian hedonism isn’t just about nerve endings. It’s about how we interpret them. If we have a major aesthetic objection to wireheading, that counts from where we’re standing, no matter how much you rachet up the presumed pleasure of wireheading.
The same goes recursively for any “hack” that could justify wireheading. For example, say you posited that wireheading would be seen as morally good, if only we could find a catchy moral justification for it.
So we let our finest AI superintelligences get to work producing one. Indeed, it’s so catchy that the entire human population acquiesces to wireheading.
Well, if we take offense to the prospect of letting the AI superintelligence infect us with a catchy pro-wireheading meme, then that’s a major point against doing so.
In general “It pleases or displeases me to find action X moral” is a valid moral argument—indeed, the only one there is.
The way moral change happens is by making moral arguments or having moral experiences that in themselves are pleasing or displeasing.
What’s needed, then, for moral change to happen, is to find a pleasing way to spread an idea that is itself pleasing to adopt—or unpleasant to abandon. To remain, that idea needs to generate pleasure for the subscriber, or to generate displeasure at the prospect of abandoning it in favor of a competing moral scheme.
To believe in some notion of moral truth or progress requires believing that the psychological reward mechanism we have attached to morality corresponds best with moral schemes that accord with moral truth.
An argument for that is that true ideas are easiest to fashion into a coherent, simple argument. And true ideas best allow us to interface with reality to advantage. Being good tends to make you get along with others better than being bad, and that’s a more pleasant way to exist.
Hence, even though strong cases can be constructed for immoral behavior, truth and goodness will tend to win in the arms race for the most pleasing presentation. So we can enjoy the idea that there is moral progress and objective moral truth, even though we make our moral decisions merely by pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain.
I looked through that post but didn’t see any support for the claim that meaning comes from pleasure.
My own theory is that meaning comes from values, and both pain and pleasure are a way to connect to the things we value, so both are associated with meaning.
I’m a classically trained pianist. Music practice involves at least four kinds of pain:
Loneliness
Frustration
Physical pain
Monotony
I perceive none of these to add meaning to music practice. In fact, it was loneliness, frustration, and monotony that caused my music practice to be slowly drained of its meaning and led me ultimately to stop playing, even though I highly valued my achievements as a classical pianist and music teacher. If there’d been an issue with physical pain, that would have been even worse.
I think what pain can do is add flavor to a story. And we use stories as a way to convey meaning. But in that context, the pain is usually illustrating the pleasures of the experience or of the positive achievement. In the context of my piano career, I was never able to use these forms of pain as a contrast to the pleasures of practice and performance. My performance anxiety was too intense, and so it also was not a source of pleasure.
By contrast, I herded sheep on the Navajo reservation for a month in the middle of winter. That experience generated many stories. Most of them revolve around a source of pain, or a mistake. But that pain or mistake serves to highlight an achievement.
That achievement could be the simple fact of making it through that month while providing a useful service to my host. Or moments of success within it: getting the sheep to drink from the hole I cut in the icy lake, busting a tunnel through the drifts with my body so they could get home, finding a mother sheep that had gotten lost when she was giving birth, not getting cannibalized by a Skinwalker.
Those make for good stories, but there is pleasure in telling those stories. I also have many stories from my life that are painful to tell. Telling them makes me feel drained of meaning.
So I believe that storytelling has the ability to create pleasure out of painful or difficult memories. That is why it feels meaningful: it is pleasurable to tell stories. And being a good storyteller can come with many rewards. The net effect of a painful experience can be positive in the long run if it lends itself to a lot of good storytelling.
Where do values enter the picture?
I think it’s because “values” is a term for the types of stories that give us pleasure. My community gets pleasure out of the stories about my time on the Navajo reservation. They also feel pleasure in my story about getting chased by a bear. I know which of my friends will feel pleasure in my stories from Burning Man, and who will find them uncomfortable.
So once again, “values” is a gloss for the pleasure we take in certain types of stories. Meaning comes from pleasure; it appears to come from values because values also come from pleasure. Meaning can come from pain only indirectly. Pain can generate stories, which generate pleasure in the telling.
It really depends on what you mean by “pleasure”. If pleasure is just “things you want”, then almost tautologically meaning comes from pleasure, since you want meaning.
If instead, pleasure is a particular phenomological feeling similar to feeling happy or content, I think that many of us actually WANT the meaning that comes from living our values, and it also happens to give us pleasure. I think that there are also people that just WANT the pleasure, and if they could get it while ignoring their values, they would.
I call this the”Heaven/Enlightenment” dichotomy, and I think it’s a frequent misunderstanding.
I’ve seen some people say “all we care about is feeling good, and people who think they care about the outside world are confused.” I’ve also seen people say “All we care about is meeting our values, and people who think it’s about feeling good are confused.”
Personally, I think that people are more towards one side of the spectrum or the other along different dimensions, and I’m inclined to believe both sides about their own experience.
I think we can consider pleasure, along with altruism, consistency, rationality, fitting the categorical imperative, and so forth as moral goods.
People have different preferences for how they trade off one against the other when they’re in conflict. But they of course prefer them not to be in conflict.
What I’m interested is not what weights people assign to these values—I agree with you that they are diverse—but on what causes people to adopt any set of preferences at all.
My hypothesis is that it’s pleasure. Or more specifically, whatever moral argument most effectively hijacks an individual person’s psychological reward system.
So if you wanted to understand why another person considers some strange action or belief to be moral, you’d need to understand why the belief system that they hold gives them pleasure.
Some predictions from that hypothesis:
People who find a complex moral argument unpleasant to think about won’t adopt it.
People who find a moral community pleasant to be in will adopt its values.
A moral argument might be very pleasant to understand, rehearse, and think about, and unpleasant to abandon. It might also be unpleasant in the actions it motivates its subscriber to undertake. It will continue to exist in their mind if the balance of pleasure in belief to displeasure in action is favorable.
Deprogramming somebody from a belief system you find abhorrent is best done by giving them alternative sources of “moral pleasure.” Examples of this include the ways people have deprogrammed people from cults and the KKK, by including them in their social gatherings, including Jewish religious dinners, and making them feel welcome. Eventually, the pleasure of adopting the moral system of that shared community displaces whatever pleasure they were deriving from their former belief system.
Paying somebody in money and status to uphold a given belief system is a great way to keep them doing it, no matter how silly it is.
If you want people do do more of a painful but necessary action X, helping them feel compensating forms of moral pleasure is a good way to go about it. Effective Altruism is a great example. By helping people understand how effective donations or direct work can save lives, they give people a feeling of heroism. Its failure mode is making people feel like the demands are impossible, and the displeasure of that disappointment is a primary issue in that community.
Another good way to encourage more of a painful but necessary action X is to teach people how to shape it into a good story that they and others will appreciate in the telling. Hence the story-fication of charity.
Many people don’t give to charity because their community disparages it as “do-gooderism,” as futile, as bragging, or as a tasteless display of wealth and privilege. If you want people to give more to charity, you have to give people a way of being able to enjoy talking about their charitable contributions. One solution is to form a community in which that’s openly accepted and appreciated. Like EA.
Likewise for the rationality community. If you want people to do more good epistemology outside of academia, give them an outlet where that’ll be appreciated and an axis from where it can be spread.
This just kicks the can down the road on you defining pleasure, all of my points still apply
That is, I think it’s possible to say that pleasure kicks in around values that we really want, rather than vice versa.