I think I can destroy this philosophy in two kicks.
Kick 1: pleasure is not one-dimensional. There are different parts of your brain that experience different pleasures, with no built-in way to compare between them.
When you retreat from kick 1 by saying “my decision-making provides a way to compare, the better pleasure is the one I’ll choose when asked”, here comes kick 2: your decision-making won’t work for that. There are compulsive behaviors that people want to do but don’t get much pleasure from them. And in every decision there’s a possible component of that, however small.
You could say “I’ll compare decisions based on how much pleasure they bring, excluding compulsiveness”, but you can’t do that due to kick 1 again. So the philosophy just collapses.
I acknowledge the complexity of formalizing pleasure, as well as formalizing everything else related to consciousness. I think it’s a technical problem that can be solved by just throwing more thinkoomph at it. Actions and feelings are often weakly connected — as I’ve said, a rational choice for most living beings could be suicide — but I think the development of rationality-as-the-art-of-winning naturally strengthens the correlation between them. At least on some level, compulsions are tied to pleasure and pain, with predictable distortions, like valuing short-term over long-term. And introspectively, I don’t see any barriers to comparing love with orgasm, with good food, with religious ecstasy, all within the same metric, even though I can’t give you numbers for it. If you believe that consciousness has a physical nature, or at least interacts with the physical world, we’ll derive those numbers. It seems to me that the multidimensionality of pleasure doesn’t explain anything because you’ll still need to stuff these parameters into a single utility function to be a coherent agent. If the most efficient way to convert negentropy into pleasure ends up being not “100% orgasm” but “37.2% love, 20.5% sexual arousal, 19.8% mono no aware, 16% humor, and 6.5% glory of fnuplpflupflonium”, then so be it, but I don’t really expect it to be true. I can’t imagine what alternative you’re proposing other than reducing everything to a single metric, or what elements other than qualia you might include in that metric.
And introspectively, I don’t see any barriers to comparing love with orgasm, with good food, with religious ecstasy, all within the same metric, even though I can’t give you numbers for it.
Why not? It’d be interesting to hear valuations from your experience and experiments, if that wasn’t very personal.
(On the other hand, if it IS too personal, then who would choose to write the metric down for an automatic system optimizing it by their whims?)
I get the impression that you’re conflating two meanings of «personal» - «private» and «individual». The fact that I might feel uncomfortable discussing this in a public forum doesn’t mean it «only works for me» or that it «doesn’t work, but I’m shielded from testing my beliefs due to privacy». There are always anonymous surveys, for example. Perhaps you meant something else?
Moreover, even if I were to provide yet another table of my own subjective experience ratings, like the ones here, you likely wouldn’t find it satisfactory — such tables already exist, with far more respondents than just myself, and you aren’t satisfied. Probably because you disagree with the methodology — for instance, since measuring «what people call pleasurable» is subject to distortions like the compulsions mentioned earlier.
But the very fact that we talk about compulsions suggests that there is a causal distinction between pleasure and «things that make us act as if we’re experiencing pleasure». And the more rational we become, the better we get at distinguishing them and calibrating our own utility functions. If we were to measure which brain stimuli would make a person press the «I AM HAPPY» button more forcefully, somewhere around the point of inducing a muscle spasm we’d quickly realize that we’re measuring the wrong thing.
There are more complex traps as well. It doesn’t take much reflection to notice that compulsively scratching one’s hands raw for a few hours of relief does not reflect one’s true values. Many describe certain foods as not particularly tasty yet addictive — like eating one potato chip and then feeling compelled to finish the entire bag, even if you don’t actually like it. It takes a certain level of awareness to recognize that social expectations of happiness differ from one’s real happiness, yet psychotherapy seems to handle that successfully. There are systemic modeling errors, such as people preferring a greater amount of pain if its average intensity per episode is lower, and such biases are difficult to eliminate.
And, of course, these traps evolve like memes, maybe faster than the means to debunk them, so average awareness may even decline, but the peak possible awareness keeps rising. For instance, knowing that intense but shorter pain is misprocessed by the brain, and having precise statistics on it, I would want an approximate subjective pain scale and an understanding of how much I need to discount my perception on average due to this bias. I would rather have false memories of horrific experiences with lower actual pain—memories I could recognize as false and recalibrate—than endure greater real pain that I would mistakenly assess as less significant. As a utopian social policy, perhaps this would require some sort of awareness license or the like.
I don’t claim any methodological breakthroughs in measuring happiness and pleasure — I do, in fact, rely on the heuristic «the better pleasure is the one I’ll choose when asked», or as I put it, «in which moment would I prefer to exist more, and by how much?». But assuming consciousness is a physical process, or at least tied to physical processes, I expect that we will only improve in these measurements over time. And it’s entirely reasonable to say that «nano-psychosurgery will just do it», allowing us to understand the physical correlates of qualia.
I get the impression that you’re conflating two meanings of «personal» - «private» and «individual». The fact that I might feel uncomfortable discussing this in a public forum doesn’t mean it «only works for me» or that it «doesn’t work, but I’m shielded from testing my beliefs due to privacy». There are always anonymous surveys, for example. Perhaps you meant something else?
I meant to say that private values/things are unlikely to coincide between different people, though now I’m a bit less sure.
Moreover, even if I were to provide yet another table of my own subjective experience ratings, like the ones here, you likely wouldn’t find it satisfactory — such tables already exist, with far more respondents than just myself, and you aren’t satisfied. Probably because you disagree with the methodology — for instance, since measuring «what people call pleasurable» is subject to distortions like the compulsions mentioned earlier.
I was unfamiliar with those, thanks for pointing! I have an idea to estimate if “optimization-power” could replace existing currencies, and those surveys’ data seems like it might be useful.
I think I can destroy this philosophy in two kicks.
Kick 1: pleasure is not one-dimensional. There are different parts of your brain that experience different pleasures, with no built-in way to compare between them.
When you retreat from kick 1 by saying “my decision-making provides a way to compare, the better pleasure is the one I’ll choose when asked”, here comes kick 2: your decision-making won’t work for that. There are compulsive behaviors that people want to do but don’t get much pleasure from them. And in every decision there’s a possible component of that, however small.
You could say “I’ll compare decisions based on how much pleasure they bring, excluding compulsiveness”, but you can’t do that due to kick 1 again. So the philosophy just collapses.
Ouch!
I acknowledge the complexity of formalizing pleasure, as well as formalizing everything else related to consciousness. I think it’s a technical problem that can be solved by just throwing more thinkoomph at it. Actions and feelings are often weakly connected — as I’ve said, a rational choice for most living beings could be suicide — but I think the development of rationality-as-the-art-of-winning naturally strengthens the correlation between them. At least on some level, compulsions are tied to pleasure and pain, with predictable distortions, like valuing short-term over long-term. And introspectively, I don’t see any barriers to comparing love with orgasm, with good food, with religious ecstasy, all within the same metric, even though I can’t give you numbers for it. If you believe that consciousness has a physical nature, or at least interacts with the physical world, we’ll derive those numbers. It seems to me that the multidimensionality of pleasure doesn’t explain anything because you’ll still need to stuff these parameters into a single utility function to be a coherent agent. If the most efficient way to convert negentropy into pleasure ends up being not “100% orgasm” but “37.2% love, 20.5% sexual arousal, 19.8% mono no aware, 16% humor, and 6.5% glory of fnuplpflupflonium”, then so be it, but I don’t really expect it to be true. I can’t imagine what alternative you’re proposing other than reducing everything to a single metric, or what elements other than qualia you might include in that metric.
Why not? It’d be interesting to hear valuations from your experience and experiments, if that wasn’t very personal.
(On the other hand, if it IS too personal, then who would choose to write the metric down for an automatic system optimizing it by their whims?)
I get the impression that you’re conflating two meanings of «personal» - «private» and «individual». The fact that I might feel uncomfortable discussing this in a public forum doesn’t mean it «only works for me» or that it «doesn’t work, but I’m shielded from testing my beliefs due to privacy». There are always anonymous surveys, for example. Perhaps you meant something else?
Moreover, even if I were to provide yet another table of my own subjective experience ratings, like the ones here, you likely wouldn’t find it satisfactory — such tables already exist, with far more respondents than just myself, and you aren’t satisfied. Probably because you disagree with the methodology — for instance, since measuring «what people call pleasurable» is subject to distortions like the compulsions mentioned earlier.
But the very fact that we talk about compulsions suggests that there is a causal distinction between pleasure and «things that make us act as if we’re experiencing pleasure». And the more rational we become, the better we get at distinguishing them and calibrating our own utility functions. If we were to measure which brain stimuli would make a person press the «I AM HAPPY» button more forcefully, somewhere around the point of inducing a muscle spasm we’d quickly realize that we’re measuring the wrong thing.
There are more complex traps as well. It doesn’t take much reflection to notice that compulsively scratching one’s hands raw for a few hours of relief does not reflect one’s true values. Many describe certain foods as not particularly tasty yet addictive — like eating one potato chip and then feeling compelled to finish the entire bag, even if you don’t actually like it. It takes a certain level of awareness to recognize that social expectations of happiness differ from one’s real happiness, yet psychotherapy seems to handle that successfully. There are systemic modeling errors, such as people preferring a greater amount of pain if its average intensity per episode is lower, and such biases are difficult to eliminate.
And, of course, these traps evolve like memes, maybe faster than the means to debunk them, so average awareness may even decline, but the peak possible awareness keeps rising. For instance, knowing that intense but shorter pain is misprocessed by the brain, and having precise statistics on it, I would want an approximate subjective pain scale and an understanding of how much I need to discount my perception on average due to this bias. I would rather have false memories of horrific experiences with lower actual pain—memories I could recognize as false and recalibrate—than endure greater real pain that I would mistakenly assess as less significant. As a utopian social policy, perhaps this would require some sort of awareness license or the like.
I don’t claim any methodological breakthroughs in measuring happiness and pleasure — I do, in fact, rely on the heuristic «the better pleasure is the one I’ll choose when asked», or as I put it, «in which moment would I prefer to exist more, and by how much?». But assuming consciousness is a physical process, or at least tied to physical processes, I expect that we will only improve in these measurements over time. And it’s entirely reasonable to say that «nano-psychosurgery will just do it», allowing us to understand the physical correlates of qualia.
I meant to say that private values/things are unlikely to coincide between different people, though now I’m a bit less sure.
I was unfamiliar with those, thanks for pointing! I have an idea to estimate if “optimization-power” could replace existing currencies, and those surveys’ data seems like it might be useful.