“Regarding the first question: evolution hasn’t made great pleasure as accessible to us as it has made pain. Fitness advantages from things like a good meal accumulate slowly but a single injury can drop one’s fitness to zero, so the pain of an injury is felt stronger than the joy of pizza. But even pizza, though quite an achievement, is far from the greatest pleasure imaginable.
Humankind has only recently begun exploring the landscape of bliss, compared to our long evolutionary history of pain. If you can’t imagine a pleasure great enough to make the trade-off worthwhile, consider that you may be falling prey to the availability heuristic. Pain is a lot more plentiful and salient, but it’s not a lot more important. The fact that pleasure is rare should only make it more valuable when offsetting pain, and an hour is a lot longer than 5 minutes.”
What makes you think there’s an equilibrium where the greatest pleasure imaginable is as good as the greatest suffering imaginable is bad (That’s at least what I think what you think)? I think there’s an asymetrie insofar that truly great suffering is hard to outweigh with great happiness. However, since no finite suffering can be infinitly bad, there has to be some amount of pleasure that outweights 5 minutes of the greatest suffering imaginable, but I don’t think 1 hour of greatest pleaure is enough. Something like 1,000,000 years may be enough.
EDIT: 1,000,000 years might be over-the-top. Assuming 100 years of greatest pleasure outweigh 5 seconds of greatest suffering, 6,000 years of greatest pleasure should be enogh.
”Taking seriously the position that life is not worth living should lead one to a philosophy of extinctionism – the stance that it would be pretty great if all humans died in their sleep tonight.”
if you subscribe to timeless decision theory, you may still be against extinctionism even if you think life is net-negative, because, when people would expect to die painlessly in there sleep, they would be absolutly terrified, and this would be bad.
“Regarding the first question: evolution hasn’t made great pleasure as accessible to us as it has made pain. Fitness advantages from things like a good meal accumulate slowly but a single injury can drop one’s fitness to zero, so the pain of an injury is felt stronger than the joy of pizza. But even pizza, though quite an achievement, is far from the greatest pleasure imaginable.
Humankind has only recently begun exploring the landscape of bliss, compared to our long evolutionary history of pain. If you can’t imagine a pleasure great enough to make the trade-off worthwhile, consider that you may be falling prey to the availability heuristic. Pain is a lot more plentiful and salient, but it’s not a lot more important. The fact that pleasure is rare should only make it more valuable when offsetting pain, and an hour is a lot longer than 5 minutes.”
What makes you think there’s an equilibrium where the greatest pleasure imaginable is as good as the greatest suffering imaginable is bad (That’s at least what I think what you think)? I think there’s an asymetrie insofar that truly great suffering is hard to outweigh with great happiness. However, since no finite suffering can be infinitly bad, there has to be some amount of pleasure that outweights 5 minutes of the greatest suffering imaginable, but I don’t think 1 hour of greatest pleaure is enough. Something like 1,000,000 years may be enough.
EDIT: 1,000,000 years might be over-the-top. Assuming 100 years of greatest pleasure outweigh 5 seconds of greatest suffering, 6,000 years of greatest pleasure should be enogh.
”Taking seriously the position that life is not worth living should lead one to a philosophy of extinctionism – the stance that it would be pretty great if all humans died in their sleep tonight.”
if you subscribe to timeless decision theory, you may still be against extinctionism even if you think life is net-negative, because, when people would expect to die painlessly in there sleep, they would be absolutly terrified, and this would be bad.