Collins 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: Collins 18 June 2011 05:21:37PM 0 points [-]

It seems like there's a lot of confusion from the semantic side of things.
There are a lot of not-unreasonable definitions of words like "wanting", "liking", "pleasure", and the like that carve the concepts up differently and have different implications for our relationship to pleasure. If they were more precisely defined at the beginning, one might say we were discovering something about them. But it seems more helpful to say that the brain chemistry suggests a good way of defining the terms (to correlate with pleasant experience, dopamine levels, etc), at which point questions of whether we just want pleasure become straightforward.

Comment author: HoverHell 22 June 2011 03:45:34AM -1 points [-]

Supposedly, there's something that a human brain (or, rather, some part of the human brain) tries to maximize (by expected over time sum of that something, … or something :) ) (as far as it can). Probably correlated with what some people describe as “subjective feeling of pleasure” (see “phenomenal judgments”).

A more interesting (and less certain) idea is: if a human considers that “some part” as own identity (“valued identity”) and all other parts of own brain as “external” (not more valued as other parts of own body), that human will seek out to be wireheaded (whether agreeing verbally to proposed thought experiments or not).