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Hul-Gil 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.
No, but that's because I value other people's pleasure as well. It is important to me to maximize all pleasure, not just my own.
What if everybody got the rewiring?
How would that work? It can't be the end of mankind if everyone is alive and rewired!
They get five minutes to pleasedly contemplate their demise first, perhaps.
I think there would be more overall pleasure if mankind continued on its merry way. It might be possible to wirehead the entire human population for the rest of the universes' lifespan, for instance; any scenario which ends the human race would necessarily have less pleasure than that.
But would I want the entire human race to be wireheaded against their will? No... I don't think so. It's not the worst fate I can think of, and I wouldn't say it's a bad result; but it seems sub-optimal. I value pleasure, but I also care about how we get it - even I would not want to be just a wirehead, but rather a wirehead who writes and explores and interacts.
Does this mean I value things other than pleasure, if I think it is the Holy Grail but it matters how it is attained? I'm not certain. I suppose I'd say my values can be reduced to pleasure first and freedom second, so that a scenario in which everyone can choose how to obtain their pleasure is better than a scenario in which everyone obtains a forced pleasure, but the latter is better than a scenario in which everyone is free but most are not pleasured.
I'm not certain if my freedom-valuing is necessary or just a relic, though. At least it (hopefully) protects against moral error by letting others choose their own paths.
The high value you place on freedom may be because, in the past, freedom has tended to lead to pleasure. The idea that people are better suited to choosing how to obtain their pleasure makes sense to us now, because people usually know how best to achieve their own subjective pleasure, whereas forced pleasures often aren't that great. But by the time wireheading technology comes around, we'll probably know enough about neurology and psychology that such problems no longer exist, and a computer could well be trusted to tell you what you would most enjoy more accurately than your own expectations could.
I agree with the intuition that most people value freedom, and so would prefer a free pleasure over a forced one if the amount of pleasure was the same. But I think that it's a situational intuition, that may not hold in the future. (And is a value really a value if it's situational?)