CuSithBell comments on Not for the Sake of Pleasure Alone - Less Wrong

36 Post author: lukeprog 11 June 2011 11:21PM

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Comment author: ArisKatsaris 16 June 2011 04:57:32PM 5 points [-]

"If you gave me that option I would not take it, because it would be a lie that I would receive pleasure from the end of mankind."

Consider the package deal to include getting your brain rewired so that you would receive pleasure from the end of mankind. Now do you choose the package deal?

I wouldn't. Can you explain to me why I wouldn't, if you believe the only thing I can want is pleasure?

Stop moving the goalposts.

Giving additional examples, based on the same principle, isn't "moving the goalposts".

Why to argue against me to you have to bring murder or death into the picture?

Because the survival of your children and the community is the foremost example of a common value that's usually placed higher than personal pleasure.

You think you want more than pleasure, but what else is there?

Knowledge, memory, and understanding. Personal and collective achievement. Honour. Other people's pleasure.

I believe if you consider any answer you might give to that question, the reason will be because those things cause pleasure.

As an automated process we receive pleasure when we get what we want, that doesn't mean that we want those things because of the pleasure. At the conscious level we self-evidently don't want them because of the pleasure, or we'd all be willing to sacrifice all of mankind if they promised to wirehead us first.

Comment author: CuSithBell 16 June 2011 05:05:45PM 9 points [-]

Consider the package deal to include getting your brain rewired so that you would receive pleasure from the end of mankind. Now do you choose the package deal?

I wouldn't. Can you explain to me why I wouldn't, if you believe the only thing I can want is pleasure?

Maybe you're hyperbolically discounting that future pleasure and it's outweighed by the temporary displeasure caused by agreeing to something abhorrent? ;)

Comment author: Amanojack 10 August 2011 03:05:22AM 1 point [-]

Plus we have a hard time conceiving of what it would be like to always be in a state of maximal, beyond-orgasmic pleasure.

When I imagine it I cannot help but let a little bit of revulsion, fear, and emptiness creep into the feeling - which of course would not be actually be there. This invalidates the whole thought experiment to me, because it's clear I'm unable to perform it correctly, and I doubt I'm uncommon in that regard.

Comment author: Ghatanathoah 28 May 2013 08:34:41PM 0 points [-]

Maybe you're hyperbolically discounting that future pleasure and it's outweighed by the temporary displeasure caused by agreeing to something abhorrent? ;)

I think that if an FAI scanned ArisKatsaris' brain, extrapolated values from that, and then was instructed to extrapolate what a non-hyperboli- discounting ArisKatsaris would choose, it would answer that ArisKatsaris would not choose to get rewired to receive pleasure from the end of mankind.

Of course, there's no way to test such a hypothesis.