Thank you for your reply, and it does clarify some things for me. If I may summarise in short, I think you are saying:
Craving is a bad sort of motivation because it makes you react badly to obstacles, but other sorts of motivation can be fine.
Self-conscious/ craving-filled states of mind can be unproductive when trying to act on these other sorts of motivations.
I still have some questions though.
You say you may pursue pleasure because you value it for its own sake. But what is the self (or subsystem?) that is doing this valuing? It feels like the valuer is a lot like a “Self 1”, the kind of self which meditation should expose to be some kind of delusion.
Here’s an attempt to put the question another way. Some one suggested in one of the previous comment threads about the topic that non-self was a bit like not identifying with your short term desires, and also your long term desires (and then eventually not identifying with anything). So why is identifying yourself with your values compatible with non-self?
EDIT: I reproduce here part of my response to Isusr, which I think is relevant, and is perhaps yet another way to ask the same question.
Typically, when we reason about what actions we should or should not perform, at the base of that reasoning is something of the form “X is intrinsically bad.” Now, I’d always associated “X is intrinsically bad” with some sort of statement like “X induces a mental state that feels wrong.” Do I have access to this line of reasoning as a perfect meditator?
Concretely, if someone asked me why I would go to a dentist if my teeth were rotting, I would have to reply that I do so because I value my health, or maybe because unhealthiness is intrinsically bad. And if they asked me why I value my health, I cannot answer except to point to the fact the that it does not feel good to me, in my head. But from what I understand, the enlightened cannot say this, because they feel that everything is good to them, in their heads.
I kind of feel that the enlightened cannot provide any reasons for their actions at all.
I am a bit confused by the lines:
″...pursuing pleasure and happiness even if that sacrifices your ability to impact the world. Reducing the influence of the craving makes your motivations less driven by wireheading-like impulses, and more able to see the world clearly even if it is painful.”
Once we have deemed that wanting to pursue pleasure and happiness are wireheading-like impulses, why stop ourselves from saying that wanting to impact the world is a wireheading-like impulse?
You also talk about meditators ignoring pain, and how the desire to avoid pain is craving. Why isn’t a desire to avoid death craving? You clearly speak as if going to a dentist when you have a tooth ache is the right thing to do, but why? Once you distance your ‘self’ from pain, why not distance yourself from your rotting teeth?
All my intuitions about how to act are based on this flawed sense of self. And from what you are outlining, I don’t see how any intuition about the right way to act can possibly remain once we lose this flawed sense of self.
There’s a general discomfort I have with this series of posts that I’m not able to fully articulate, but the above questions seem related.