In at least some of these cases there’s a likely asymmetry between the two Sides of the Chair, which may make it harder to maintain that we shouldn’t favour one side’s preferences over the other’s. Namely, in some cases one of the two states is not sustainable. For instance, it’s impossible and/or impractical to be high on (say) heroin for more than a smallish fraction of your life. (I think that’s true, but I am not a drug expert. If it happens not to be true about heroin, that probably just means I picked a bad example. [EDIT: as David Nelson points out, that was in fact a bad example, but replacing heroin with hallucinogens fixes it. END OF EDIT]) So doing something that gratifies you-while-high but more severely harms you-while-not-high is likely to be bad for you-on-average.
In some other cases, one state is indefinitely sustainable but only at a cost that both versions might (if they could be convinced that the cost is real) find unacceptable. For instance, one can doubtless stay crazy for ever, but if one could explain to crazy-you that taking the antipsychotic drugs at least most of the time will make it possible to have a job, a partner-of-the-appropriate-sex, a life that doesn’t involve being locked up all the time, etc., then I suspect that even crazy-you might agree that the price is worth paying. (Of course, if crazy-you is crazy enough then this is a hopeless project. Too bad; can’t win ’em all.) Or: even when you’re guzzling chocolate cake, you might well agree that you have to moderate your appetite most of the time because even cake-guzzling-you doesn’t want to be a ball of lard six feet in diameter.
I don’t claim that this asymmetry makes it obviously definitely right to enforce the wishes of you-in-the-sustainable-state even when you’re in the unsustainable state and have very different wishes; but it does seem to offer a better justification for doing so than “simple bias in favour of mental states similar to our own”. In some cases, at least.
Heroin/opiates are a bad example. Addicts with a steady supply or chronic pain patients are able to go years without skipping a day. I can’t track it down right now, but I read a study a few years ago from some European county where they decided to try just giving a group of addicts all the heroin they wanted. The majority used every day, held down jobs, stayed out jail, and were relatively healthy. Of course government spending money to give addicts drugs was an outrage., so the program got shut down early.
Hallucinogens would be a better example, there would be no way to function in society if you were constantly on one.
The book Licit and Illicit Drugs points out that one of the founders of Johns Hopkins was a heroin addict. Being a doctor, he was able to take it in pill form for many years and nobody was the wiser in terms of his productivity.
For instance, one can doubtless stay crazy for ever, but if one could explain to crazy-you that taking the antipsychotic drugs at least most of the time will make it possible to have a job, a partner-of-the-appropriate-sex, a life that doesn’t involve being locked up all the time, etc., then I suspect that even crazy-you might agree that the price is worth paying.
Don’t be sure about that. One of the reasons schizophrenics are so problematic is that they can’t be trusted to take their meds. Apparently in a subset of schizophrenics, the condition causes them to see the world as ‘vivid’, bright, popping out at them in great details; and the medications bring them down to the grey dull normal perceptions—which they don’t like and sometimes will skip their medications to retrieve. Even if that does mean risking the trappings of a normal life they’ve managed to piece together.
So doing something that gratifies you-while-high but more severely harms you-while-not-high is likely to be bad for you-on-average.
So can we derive a general principle from this? Perhaps: ‘we should do what benefits us over the long run, and not the short’.
So to take the cheesecake example: the duration of me which suffers for having eaten the cheesecake (both directly and for having broken my diet) is much much longer than the duration of me enjoying the cheesecake, and so we shouldn’t eat the cheesecake.
If we leave out mention of peaks entirely, then we avoid issues like ‘but the hallucinogen feels awesome!’
Or to take the wireheading example: if the wireheading could be sustained over a long time, comparable to a normal lifespan, and we’re not talking the Niven scenario of dying in a few weeks, why wouldn’t we permit the wireheading? It is almost by definition not harmful. (And arguments about higher pleasures of life than direct neural stimulation, are, I think, addressed by Mills’s old quip about ‘better to be Socrates dissatisfied’.)
Basing our decisions on duration seems to me to deal with silver chairs satisfactorily. We appeal to decisions made ‘sitting quietly’ because that’s what the rest of our life, averaged out, is like, and per the foregoing we should privilege the long-term over the short.
(And this privileging of duration even has some historical precedent; in Indian philosophy, one point of contention between Sankara/Vedantin and the Yogacara darsana was over being & perception; the Yogacara argued that we had no way to say that dreams were less real than reality, since we perceived both. Sankara’s arguments consigning dreams to falsity were that waking life is longer than dreams, and waking life endures and contradicts dreams, while the reverse did not occur. Our argument here is somewhat analogous: which desire, the long-term average of our many selves, or the short-term current desire, is more ‘real’ and thus the one we should follow?)
So doing something that gratifies you-while-high but more severely harms you-while-not-high is likely to be bad for you-on-average.
Well, this gets to a point I made explicit in an earlier draft of this post: viz., how can an outside observer determine the strength of a desire? Meaning, if the heroin addict continues to get high, how can you say those short periods don’t outweigh all the rest? (Or to use the example from that earlier draft: how can you say that the burst of satisfaction a suicide feels as he dies doesn’t outweigh the entire remaining life he would have had?)
The obvious answer is brain scans or similar, which might easily show a maximum possible intensity of satisfaction, but I have a (probably irrational) distrust of such methods.
In at least some of these cases there’s a likely asymmetry between the two Sides of the Chair, which may make it harder to maintain that we shouldn’t favour one side’s preferences over the other’s. Namely, in some cases one of the two states is not sustainable. For instance, it’s impossible and/or impractical to be high on (say) heroin for more than a smallish fraction of your life. (I think that’s true, but I am not a drug expert. If it happens not to be true about heroin, that probably just means I picked a bad example. [EDIT: as David Nelson points out, that was in fact a bad example, but replacing heroin with hallucinogens fixes it. END OF EDIT]) So doing something that gratifies you-while-high but more severely harms you-while-not-high is likely to be bad for you-on-average.
In some other cases, one state is indefinitely sustainable but only at a cost that both versions might (if they could be convinced that the cost is real) find unacceptable. For instance, one can doubtless stay crazy for ever, but if one could explain to crazy-you that taking the antipsychotic drugs at least most of the time will make it possible to have a job, a partner-of-the-appropriate-sex, a life that doesn’t involve being locked up all the time, etc., then I suspect that even crazy-you might agree that the price is worth paying. (Of course, if crazy-you is crazy enough then this is a hopeless project. Too bad; can’t win ’em all.) Or: even when you’re guzzling chocolate cake, you might well agree that you have to moderate your appetite most of the time because even cake-guzzling-you doesn’t want to be a ball of lard six feet in diameter.
I don’t claim that this asymmetry makes it obviously definitely right to enforce the wishes of you-in-the-sustainable-state even when you’re in the unsustainable state and have very different wishes; but it does seem to offer a better justification for doing so than “simple bias in favour of mental states similar to our own”. In some cases, at least.
Heroin/opiates are a bad example. Addicts with a steady supply or chronic pain patients are able to go years without skipping a day. I can’t track it down right now, but I read a study a few years ago from some European county where they decided to try just giving a group of addicts all the heroin they wanted. The majority used every day, held down jobs, stayed out jail, and were relatively healthy. Of course government spending money to give addicts drugs was an outrage., so the program got shut down early.
Hallucinogens would be a better example, there would be no way to function in society if you were constantly on one.
The book Licit and Illicit Drugs points out that one of the founders of Johns Hopkins was a heroin addict. Being a doctor, he was able to take it in pill form for many years and nobody was the wiser in terms of his productivity.
There’s been more than one such experiment—this Google search finds results about one in Liverpool but mention others in Sweden and other countries.
Thanks for improving my poor choice of example :-).
Don’t be sure about that. One of the reasons schizophrenics are so problematic is that they can’t be trusted to take their meds. Apparently in a subset of schizophrenics, the condition causes them to see the world as ‘vivid’, bright, popping out at them in great details; and the medications bring them down to the grey dull normal perceptions—which they don’t like and sometimes will skip their medications to retrieve. Even if that does mean risking the trappings of a normal life they’ve managed to piece together.
So can we derive a general principle from this? Perhaps: ‘we should do what benefits us over the long run, and not the short’. So to take the cheesecake example: the duration of me which suffers for having eaten the cheesecake (both directly and for having broken my diet) is much much longer than the duration of me enjoying the cheesecake, and so we shouldn’t eat the cheesecake. If we leave out mention of peaks entirely, then we avoid issues like ‘but the hallucinogen feels awesome!’ Or to take the wireheading example: if the wireheading could be sustained over a long time, comparable to a normal lifespan, and we’re not talking the Niven scenario of dying in a few weeks, why wouldn’t we permit the wireheading? It is almost by definition not harmful. (And arguments about higher pleasures of life than direct neural stimulation, are, I think, addressed by Mills’s old quip about ‘better to be Socrates dissatisfied’.) Basing our decisions on duration seems to me to deal with silver chairs satisfactorily. We appeal to decisions made ‘sitting quietly’ because that’s what the rest of our life, averaged out, is like, and per the foregoing we should privilege the long-term over the short.
(And this privileging of duration even has some historical precedent; in Indian philosophy, one point of contention between Sankara/Vedantin and the Yogacara darsana was over being & perception; the Yogacara argued that we had no way to say that dreams were less real than reality, since we perceived both. Sankara’s arguments consigning dreams to falsity were that waking life is longer than dreams, and waking life endures and contradicts dreams, while the reverse did not occur. Our argument here is somewhat analogous: which desire, the long-term average of our many selves, or the short-term current desire, is more ‘real’ and thus the one we should follow?)
Well, this gets to a point I made explicit in an earlier draft of this post: viz., how can an outside observer determine the strength of a desire? Meaning, if the heroin addict continues to get high, how can you say those short periods don’t outweigh all the rest? (Or to use the example from that earlier draft: how can you say that the burst of satisfaction a suicide feels as he dies doesn’t outweigh the entire remaining life he would have had?)
The obvious answer is brain scans or similar, which might easily show a maximum possible intensity of satisfaction, but I have a (probably irrational) distrust of such methods.
Do you see that asymmetry in wireheading? (Suppose that you have a modest trust fund.)
Dunno; but the fact that you probably couldn’t without the trust fund seems relevant.