I applaud the attempt to identify the shape of desiderata, and the recognition that different dimensions likely have different … dimensionality. I worry that the underlying impossibility of crossing is-ought boundary (aka: all values are individual, and we don’t have a theory for which preferences are “correct”) torpedoes the whole effort.
Generally, as I see it, in the theory of fun, there are two fundamental questions:
What counts as fun?
What function/functional over fun do we maximize? How do we aggregate fun units into some scalar that we set as a target criterion?
For the purposes of this post, suppose we have already done the hard philosophical work and we know what truly good experience is, the real eudaimonia rather than wireheading or a vat of hedonium, and so on (so question 1 is answered), and let us call its local density “fun” for short. And so we focus on question 2.
Wait. Question 1 is the hard one. The answer to question 2 is “Fun IS the thing being maximized”. Once you’ve defined fun in an operational/measurable way (including how it aggregates across time and populations), you’re “just” trying to increase that metric.
I applaud the attempt to identify the shape of desiderata, and the recognition that different dimensions likely have different … dimensionality. I worry that the underlying impossibility of crossing is-ought boundary (aka: all values are individual, and we don’t have a theory for which preferences are “correct”) torpedoes the whole effort.
Wait. Question 1 is the hard one. The answer to question 2 is “Fun IS the thing being maximized”. Once you’ve defined fun in an operational/measurable way (including how it aggregates across time and populations), you’re “just” trying to increase that metric.