This may be the rare case where I’m more of a materialist reductionist than you, Eliezer. I think unhappiness is just brain structure/chemistry. I’d go further than Ferris and say excitement is too. The flip side of this is that you may be giving a lot of people bad advice and unrealistic expectations in this post. For a lot of people their unhappiness is a complicated unsolved challenge of bioengineering. With better technology, perhaps we’ll be able to solve it. Until then, they may spend a period of time being unhappy, not due to the fuzzy advice you give in the last paragraph. And not due to anything about “morality”.
This may be the rare case where I’m more of a materialist reductionist than you, Eliezer. I think unhappiness is just brain structure/chemistry. I’d go further than Ferris and say excitement is too. The flip side of this is that you may be giving a lot of people bad advice and unrealistic expectations in this post. For a lot of people their unhappiness is a complicated unsolved challenge of bioengineering. With better technology, perhaps we’ll be able to solve it. Until then, they may spend a period of time being unhappy, not due to the fuzzy advice you give in the last paragraph. And not due to anything about “morality”.