I think you and Alicorn may be talking past each other somewhat.
Throughout my life, it seems that what I morally value has varied more than what rightness feels like—just as it seems that what I consider status-raising has changed more than what rising in status feels like, and what I find physically pleasurable has changed more than what physical pleasures feel like. It’s possible that the things my whole person is optimizing for have not changed at all, that my subjective feelings are a direct reflection of this, and that my evaluation of a change of content is merely a change in my causal model of the production of the desiderata (I thought voting for Smith would lower unemployment, but now I think voting for Jones would, etc.) But it seems more plausible to me that
1) the whole me is optimizing for various things, and these things change over time, 2) and that the conscious me is getting information inputs which it can group together by family resemblance, and which can reinforce or disincentivize its behavior.
Imagine a ship which is governed by an anarchic assembly beneath board and captained by an employee of theirs whom they motivate through in-kind bonuses. So the assembly at one moment might be looking for buried treasure, which they think is in such-and-such a place, and so they send her baskets of fresh apples when she’s steering in that direction and baskets of stinky rotten apples when she’s steering in the wrong. For other goals (refueling, not crashing into reefs) they send her excellent or tedious movies and gorgeous or ugly cabana boys. The captain doesn’t even have direct access to what the apples or whatever are motivating her to do; although she can piece it together. She might even start thinking of apples as irreducibly connected to treasure. But if the assembly decided that they wanted to look for ports of call instead of treasure, I don’t see why in principle they couldn’t start sending her apples in order to do so. And if they did, I think her first response would be, if she was verbally asked, that the treasure—or whatever the dubloons constituting the treasure ultimately represent in terms of the desiderata of the assembly—had moved to the ports of call. This might be a correct inference—perhaps the assembly wants the treasure for money and now they think that comes better from heading to ports of call—but it hardly seems to be a necessarily correct one.
If I met two vampires, and one said his desire to drink blood was mediated through hunger (and that he no longer felt hunger for food, or lust) and another said her desire to drink blood was mediated through lust (and that she no longer felt lust for sex, or hunger) then I do think—presuming they were both once human, experiencing lust and hunger like me—they’ve told me something that allows me to distinguish their experiences from one another, even though they both desire blood and not food or sex.
They may or may not be able to explain to what it is like to be a bat.
Unless I’m inserting a further layer of misunderstanding your position seems to be curiously disjunctivist. I or you or Alicorn or all of us may be making bad inferences in taking “feels like” to mean “reminds one of the sort of experience that brings to mind...” (“I feel like I got mauled by a bear,” says someone not just and maybe never mauled by a bear) or “constituting an experience of” (“what an algorithm feels like from the inside”) when the other is intended. This seems to be a pretty easy elision to make—consider all the philosophers who say things like “well, it feels like we have libertarian free will...”
I think you and Alicorn may be talking past each other somewhat.
Throughout my life, it seems that what I morally value has varied more than what rightness feels like—just as it seems that what I consider status-raising has changed more than what rising in status feels like, and what I find physically pleasurable has changed more than what physical pleasures feel like. It’s possible that the things my whole person is optimizing for have not changed at all, that my subjective feelings are a direct reflection of this, and that my evaluation of a change of content is merely a change in my causal model of the production of the desiderata (I thought voting for Smith would lower unemployment, but now I think voting for Jones would, etc.) But it seems more plausible to me that
1) the whole me is optimizing for various things, and these things change over time,
2) and that the conscious me is getting information inputs which it can group together by family resemblance, and which can reinforce or disincentivize its behavior.
Imagine a ship which is governed by an anarchic assembly beneath board and captained by an employee of theirs whom they motivate through in-kind bonuses. So the assembly at one moment might be looking for buried treasure, which they think is in such-and-such a place, and so they send her baskets of fresh apples when she’s steering in that direction and baskets of stinky rotten apples when she’s steering in the wrong. For other goals (refueling, not crashing into reefs) they send her excellent or tedious movies and gorgeous or ugly cabana boys. The captain doesn’t even have direct access to what the apples or whatever are motivating her to do; although she can piece it together. She might even start thinking of apples as irreducibly connected to treasure. But if the assembly decided that they wanted to look for ports of call instead of treasure, I don’t see why in principle they couldn’t start sending her apples in order to do so. And if they did, I think her first response would be, if she was verbally asked, that the treasure—or whatever the dubloons constituting the treasure ultimately represent in terms of the desiderata of the assembly—had moved to the ports of call. This might be a correct inference—perhaps the assembly wants the treasure for money and now they think that comes better from heading to ports of call—but it hardly seems to be a necessarily correct one.
If I met two vampires, and one said his desire to drink blood was mediated through hunger (and that he no longer felt hunger for food, or lust) and another said her desire to drink blood was mediated through lust (and that she no longer felt lust for sex, or hunger) then I do think—presuming they were both once human, experiencing lust and hunger like me—they’ve told me something that allows me to distinguish their experiences from one another, even though they both desire blood and not food or sex.
They may or may not be able to explain to what it is like to be a bat.
Unless I’m inserting a further layer of misunderstanding your position seems to be curiously disjunctivist. I or you or Alicorn or all of us may be making bad inferences in taking “feels like” to mean “reminds one of the sort of experience that brings to mind...” (“I feel like I got mauled by a bear,” says someone not just and maybe never mauled by a bear) or “constituting an experience of” (“what an algorithm feels like from the inside”) when the other is intended. This seems to be a pretty easy elision to make—consider all the philosophers who say things like “well, it feels like we have libertarian free will...”