Emotions are hardwired stereotyped syndromes of hardwired blunt-force cognitive actions. E.g. fear makes your heart beat faster and puts an expression on your face and makes you consider negative outcomes more and maybe makes you pay attention to your surroundings. So it doesn’t make much sense to value emotions, but emotions are good ways of telling that you value something; e.g. if you feel fear in response to X, probably X causes something you don’t want, or if you feel happy when / after doing Y, probably Y causes / involves something you want.
Emotions are about reality, but emotions are also a part of reality, so we also have emotions about emotions. I can feel happy about some good thing happening in the outside world. And, separately, I can feel happy about being happy.
In the thought experiments about wireheading, people often say that they don’t just want to experience (possibly fake) happy thoughts about X; they also want X to actually happen.
But let’s imagine the converse: what if someone proposed a surgery that would make you unable to ever feel happy about X, even if you knew that X actually happened in the world. People would probably refuse that, too. Intuitively, we want to feel good emotions that we “deserve”, plus there is also the factor of motivation. Okay, so let’s imagine a surgery that removes your ability to feel happy about X, but solves the problem of motivation by e.g. giving you an urge to do X. People would probably refuse that, too.
So I think we actually want both the emotions and the things the emotions are about.
I think this is a non sequitur. Everything you value can be described as just <dismissive reductionist description>, so the fact that emotions can too isn’t a good argument against valuing them. And in this case, the dismissive reductionist description misses a crucial property: emotions are accompanied by (or identical with, depending on definitions) valenced qualia.
Emotions are hardwired stereotyped syndromes of hardwired blunt-force cognitive actions. E.g. fear makes your heart beat faster and puts an expression on your face and makes you consider negative outcomes more and maybe makes you pay attention to your surroundings. So it doesn’t make much sense to value emotions, but emotions are good ways of telling that you value something; e.g. if you feel fear in response to X, probably X causes something you don’t want, or if you feel happy when / after doing Y, probably Y causes / involves something you want.
Emotions are about reality, but emotions are also a part of reality, so we also have emotions about emotions. I can feel happy about some good thing happening in the outside world. And, separately, I can feel happy about being happy.
In the thought experiments about wireheading, people often say that they don’t just want to experience (possibly fake) happy thoughts about X; they also want X to actually happen.
But let’s imagine the converse: what if someone proposed a surgery that would make you unable to ever feel happy about X, even if you knew that X actually happened in the world. People would probably refuse that, too. Intuitively, we want to feel good emotions that we “deserve”, plus there is also the factor of motivation. Okay, so let’s imagine a surgery that removes your ability to feel happy about X, but solves the problem of motivation by e.g. giving you an urge to do X. People would probably refuse that, too.
So I think we actually want both the emotions and the things the emotions are about.
I think this is a non sequitur. Everything you value can be described as just <dismissive reductionist description>, so the fact that emotions can too isn’t a good argument against valuing them. And in this case, the dismissive reductionist description misses a crucial property: emotions are accompanied by (or identical with, depending on definitions) valenced qualia.