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.
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.