Asking what happens often, and binding happy emotions to that, so as to increase happiness—or asking what seems easy, and binding happy emotions to that—making isolated video games artificially more emotionally involving, for example -
At that point, it seems to me, you’ve pretty much given up on eudaimonia and moved to maximizing happiness; you might as well replace brains with pleasure centers, and civilizations with hedonium plasma.
Well, why not? What makes changing the external stimulus more worthwhile than the subjective experience of it? It can’t be that you hold the emotions evolution gave us as sacred or you wouldn’t want to eliminate racial prejudice.
Asking what happens often, and binding happy emotions to that, so as to increase happiness—or asking what seems easy, and binding happy emotions to that—making isolated video games artificially more emotionally involving, for example -
At that point, it seems to me, you’ve pretty much given up on eudaimonia and moved to maximizing happiness; you might as well replace brains with pleasure centers, and civilizations with hedonium plasma. Well, why not? What makes changing the external stimulus more worthwhile than the subjective experience of it? It can’t be that you hold the emotions evolution gave us as sacred or you wouldn’t want to eliminate racial prejudice.