You could say it depends how deep and thick the delusion is. If it’s so deep that the animal always says “this experience is good actually” no matter how you ask, so deep that the animal intelligently pursues the experience with its whole being, so deep that the animal never flinches away from the experience in any way, then that completely means that the experience is good, to that organism. Past a certain point, believing an experience is good and acting like you believe it just is the definition of liking the experience.
so deep that the animal always says “this experience is good actually” no matter how you ask, so deep that the animal intelligently pursues the experience with its whole being, so deep that the animal never flinches away from the experience in any way
This is very different from your original claim, which was that an experience being worse than a neutral or null experience “fully boils down to whether the experience includes a preference to be dead (or to have not been born).”
edit: if you do stand by the original claim, I don’t think it makes much sense even if I set aside hard problem-adjacent concerns. Why would I necessarily prefer to be dead/unborn while undergoing an experience that is worse than the absence of experience, but not so bad as to outweigh my life up until now (in the case of ‘unborn’) or expected future life (in the case of ‘dead’)?
Ah, I think my definition applies to lives in totality. I don’t think you can measure the quality of a life by summing the quality of its moments, for humans, at least. Sometimes things that happen towards the end give the whole of it a different meaning. You can’t tell by looking at a section of it.
Hedonists are always like “well the satisfaction of things coming together in the end was just so immensely pleasurable that it outweighed all of the suffering you went through along the way” and like, I’m looking at the satisfaction, and I remember the suffering, and no it isn’t, but it was still all worth it (and if I’d known it would go this way perhaps I would have found the labor easier.)
That wasn’t presented as a definition of positive wellbeing, it was presented as an example of a sense in which one can’t be deeply deluded about one’s own values; you dictate your values, they are whatever you believe they are, if you believe spiritedly enough.
Values determine will to live under the given definition, but don’t equate to it.
You could say it depends how deep and thick the delusion is. If it’s so deep that the animal always says “this experience is good actually” no matter how you ask, so deep that the animal intelligently pursues the experience with its whole being, so deep that the animal never flinches away from the experience in any way, then that completely means that the experience is good, to that organism. Past a certain point, believing an experience is good and acting like you believe it just is the definition of liking the experience.
This is very different from your original claim, which was that an experience being worse than a neutral or null experience “fully boils down to whether the experience includes a preference to be dead (or to have not been born).”
edit: if you do stand by the original claim, I don’t think it makes much sense even if I set aside hard problem-adjacent concerns. Why would I necessarily prefer to be dead/unborn while undergoing an experience that is worse than the absence of experience, but not so bad as to outweigh my life up until now (in the case of ‘unborn’) or expected future life (in the case of ‘dead’)?
Ah, I think my definition applies to lives in totality. I don’t think you can measure the quality of a life by summing the quality of its moments, for humans, at least. Sometimes things that happen towards the end give the whole of it a different meaning. You can’t tell by looking at a section of it.
Hedonists are always like “well the satisfaction of things coming together in the end was just so immensely pleasurable that it outweighed all of the suffering you went through along the way” and like, I’m looking at the satisfaction, and I remember the suffering, and no it isn’t, but it was still all worth it (and if I’d known it would go this way perhaps I would have found the labor easier.)
That wasn’t presented as a definition of positive wellbeing, it was presented as an example of a sense in which one can’t be deeply deluded about one’s own values; you dictate your values, they are whatever you believe they are, if you believe spiritedly enough.
Values determine will to live under the given definition, but don’t equate to it.