that little twinge of sympathetic pain

Zen doesn't have any objection to momentary twinges, so long as they don't interfere with anything practical. (See, e.g., the story of the two monks whose punchline is "Are you still carrying her?")

I think that Asimov's "never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" is a very Zen saying. ;-)

I hope I never get to the point where I think the statement, "Oh boy, people are hurting! What an exciting opportunity for me to do something that I find to be pleasurable!"

Come on now. Do you want to tell me that writing that sentence didn't just give you an enjoyable feeling of righteous indignation?

See, there are many kinds of "feeling good" besides "pleasure". Love and compassion feel good... and so too, unfortunately, does righteous indignation.

However, not all kinds of feeling good motivate the same kinds of actions - each comes with its own bias as to what type of actions are selected. Indignation and love, obviously, motivate different sorts of actions, despite both feeling good!

Notice, btw, that I'm speaking here of what actions are motivated by having the feeling, which is a different thing than the motivation to obtain the feeling. The pleasure of having ice cream is not the same as having a desire to get some.

This is because humans are not utility maximizers; we're more like time-averaged satisficers. Desire arises when our time-averaged measurement of some physical or virtual property (like "blood sugar level" or "amount of interesting stuff to do") drops below some reference point, and we then take action to restore that property to a perceived-safe or optimal level.

This is why trying to discuss humans behavior in terms of "utility" is a complete waste of time if you want to understand what's actually going to happen when you self-modify.

At a fundamental level, we are not utility maximizers, even though we can certainly entertain the belief that we desire to be utility maximizers, or participate in competitive or co-operative frameworks that collectively aim towards maximizing something (e.g. corporations).

There is the hedonic aspect; I like my job. There is also a moral motivation.

Yeah... this is where we need to sort out the signaling.

See, here's what I said:

From my observation of some philanthropists I know, they do not appear to be feeling bad about people suffering in Africa; they instead feel good about being able to do something.

You then basically said this is terrible, and that you have "moral" motivation instead. But then, you go on to say:

However, what I enjoy more is actually people getting help.

Uh, so how is that not feeling good "about being able to do something"?

You're right, feeling upset by an immoral situation isn't doing anything, but that upsetness is what motivates us to do something.

Really? Let's test that, shall we.

Which of the following more closely matches your experience every day:

• "Man, the world is full of diseased people. I feel awful. Better get to work right away..."

• "Man, I'm glad I can make a difference. Let's get to work!"

It's really easy to test my hypothesis: different emotions bias people towards different types of action. (Actually, I'd guess that if you put it that broadly, there's probably already plenty of research to support it.)

More specifically, though, my thesis is that most emotions we describe as "negative" do not support any sort of sustained activity over time, in the absence of a visceral, immediate threat. They especially don't support creative or imaginative thinking, or indeed any sort of clear, non-rote thinking at all. (Also fairly-well documented.)

IOW, negative emotions bias towards short-term, rote and reactive behaviors, which make them far less useful for actually changing anything. They're designed for emergency responses, not ambitious campaigns of action.

Sure, negative emotions can motivate us to "do something"... the problem is, it's the sort of motivation that leads to the syllogism:

1. We must do something!
2. This is something.
3. Therefore, we must do this.

In other words, a short-term emergency response.

None of the philanthropists I know seem to view their activities as an emergency, and they take thoughtful and considered long-term actions. When they speak, they don't seem to me to be experiencing any negative emotion. They say, "These people don't have water. We can help them. Let's do this!"

Now, there is one category of negative emotion that appears to produce motivation, and that'd be the category that contains moral signaling emotions, such as righteous indignation, disgust, disapproval, etc.

People under the influence of these emotions often appear to be "doing something", but that "something" is usually something like protesting, "raising awareness", or engaging in other "X is not about Y" activities.

That's because these emotions bias us towards activities of protest and punishment. And, as I mentioned in the "offense" thread recently, such protest and punishment actions usually don't accomplish anything, while making us feel like we're accomplishing something... thus leading to a perverse form of covert procrastination.

(Like spending a lot of time being mad about having to take out the trash, instead of just taking the trash out already so you don't have to think about it any more!)

For this reason, my most recent major change in mind-hacking heuristics is to look for a pattern of moral disapproval of something...

And then have the subject get rid of it.

Because when we're under the influence of those "moral" feelings, our brains seem blocked from thinking about how to solve the actual problem, vs. just protesting it in some way, and maybe trying to get other people to do something about it!

Which means that Asimov really was right after all.

Because, as it turns out, our feelings of moral disapproval -- our "sense of morals", if you will -- really does prevent us from doing what is right.

And that's why you're wrong about upset being motivating. The feeling of disapproval ("this is unacceptable") is distinct from the feeling of sympathy or compassion evoked by someone else's suffering, and each feeling will motivate you to do different things, over different time periods.

P.S. One secondary effect of moral feelings that I've noticed, is that they motivate us to speak out in favor of keeping the morals that generate them. Which makes sense if you think about tribal politics: anybody who suggests that maybe we shouldn't get so upset about people pissing in the river is probably pissing in the river him/herself, and so should be publicly disapproved of -- i.e., punish the advocate of non-punishing.

This happens with me too, with every stupid "moral" injunction I remove: my first emotional response is to protest that if I, say, stop disapproving of people who aren't sufficiently perfectionistic, then somehow society will collapse and the world will be in chaos.

While that might've been the case in our ancestral environment, the truth in today's world is that the only thing affected by me stopping my disapproval is that I'll be nicer to people who weren't going to change because of my disapproval anyway. ;-)

So... I suggest you consider whether your reaction to what the Buddhists said, and what I'm saying, is simply a protest from that part of your brain that motivates the maintenance of moral rules, whether or not there's any real consequences for changing the rules.

In the modern world, where few of us hold any real punishment powers over most of the people we encounter, moral disapproval is by and large a maladaptive response.

If you purge emotions, I think your desires would go away too, which would probably make you indistinguishable from a computer in standby mode.

This sounds like a theory that could use testing.