“Any less than that, and your motivation to go on working can still be torpedoed by not being able to visualize a light at the end of the tunnel.”
I understand, and I’m hardly a perfect rationalist myself, but to me it seems that you don’t need to go so far as this to motivate people. You can easily come up with post-FAI scenarios that are much preferable to the modern day without having to speculate about hedon representation in the year 12000, when we don’t even know exactly what a hedon is or even what we really want in the long term. And if someone is convinced that post-singularity life can’t help but be horrible (or even is just a bit dubious about the whole scenario), then I doubt such “crazy sounding” ideas are going to make them listen.
On a side note, a lot of the stuff in this post seems very closely related to wireheading to me—not that I’m necessarily against that, but I know you are, and this post almost seems to be leading up to wireheading by another name.
“Any less than that, and your motivation to go on working can still be torpedoed by not being able to visualize a light at the end of the tunnel.”
I understand, and I’m hardly a perfect rationalist myself, but to me it seems that you don’t need to go so far as this to motivate people. You can easily come up with post-FAI scenarios that are much preferable to the modern day without having to speculate about hedon representation in the year 12000, when we don’t even know exactly what a hedon is or even what we really want in the long term. And if someone is convinced that post-singularity life can’t help but be horrible (or even is just a bit dubious about the whole scenario), then I doubt such “crazy sounding” ideas are going to make them listen.
On a side note, a lot of the stuff in this post seems very closely related to wireheading to me—not that I’m necessarily against that, but I know you are, and this post almost seems to be leading up to wireheading by another name.