While I (a year late) tentatively agree with you (though a million years of suffering is a hard thing to swallow compared to the instinctually almost mundane matter of death) I think there’s an assumption in your argument that bears inspection. Namely, I believe you are maximizing happiness at a given instance in time—the present, or the limit as time approaches infinity, etc. (Or, perhaps, you are predicating the calculations on the possibility of escaping the heat death of the universe, and being truly immortal for eternity.) A (possibly) alternate optimization goal—maximize human happiness, summed over time. See, I was thinking, the other day, and it seems possible we may never evade the heat death of the universe. In such a case, if you only value the final state, nothing we do matters, whether we suffer or go extinct tomorrow. At the very least, this metric is not helpful, because it cannot distinguish between any two states. So a different metric must be chosen. A reasonable substitute seems to me to be to effectively take the integral of human happiness over time, sum it up. The happy week you had last week is not canceled out by a mildly depressing day today, for instance—it still counts. Conversely, suffering for a long time may not be automatically balanced out the moment you stop suffering (though I’ll grant this goes a little against my instincts). If you DO assume infinite time, though, your argument may return to being automatically true. I’m not sure that’s an assumption that should be confidently made, though. If you don’t assume infinite time, I think it matters again what precise value you put on death, vs incredible suffering, and that may simply be a matter of opinion, of precise differences in two people’s terminal goals.
(Side note: I’ve idly speculated about expanding the above optimization criteria for the case of all-possible-universes—I forget the exact train of thought, but it ended up more or less behaving in a manner such that you optimize the probability-weighted ratio of good outcomes to bad outcomes (summed across time, I guess). Needs more thought to become more rigorous etc.)
I feel like the concept of “neural address” is incompletely described, and the specifics may matter. For example, a specific point in the skull, yeah, is a bad way to address a specific concept, between individuals. However, there might be, say, particular matching structures that tend to form around certain ideas, and searching on those structures might be a better way of addressing a particular concept. (Probably still not good, but it hints in the direction that there may be better ways of formulating a neural address that maybe WOULD be sufficiently descriptive. I don’t know any particularly good methods, of the top of my head, though, and your point may turn out correct.)