CuSithBell comments on Not for the Sake of Pleasure Alone - Less Wrong
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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?
Giving additional examples, based on the same principle, isn't "moving the goalposts".
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.
Knowledge, memory, and understanding. Personal and collective achievement. Honour. Other people's 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.
Maybe you're hyperbolically discounting that future pleasure and it's outweighed by the temporary displeasure caused by agreeing to something abhorrent? ;)
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.
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.