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Jayson_Virissimo comments on A (small) critique of total utilitarianism - Less Wrong
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I agree. I'm fairly confident that, within the next several decades, we will have the technology to accurately measure and sum hedons and that hedonic utilitarianism can escape the conceptual problems inherent in preference utilitarianism. On the other hand, I do not want to maximize (my) hedons (for these kinds of reasons, among others).
Err...what? Technology will tell you things about how brains (and computer programs) vary, but not which differences to count as "more pleasure" or "less pleasure." If evaluations of pleasure happen over 10x as many neurons is there 10x as much pleasure? Or is it the causal-functional role pleasure plays in determining the behavior of a body? What if we connect many brains or programs to different sorts of virtual bodies? Probabilistically?
A rule to get a cardinal measure of pleasure across brains is going to require almost as much specification as a broader preference measure. Dualists can think of this as guesstimating "psychophysical laws" and physicalists can think of it as seeking reflective equilibrium in our stances towards different physical systems, but it's not going to be "read out" of neuroscience without deciding a bunch of evaluative (or philosophy of mind) questions.
Sure, but I don't think we can predict that there will be a lot of room for deciding those philosophy of mind questions whichever way one wants to. One simply has to wait for the research results to come in. With more data to constrain the interpretations, the number and spread of plausible stable reflective equilibria might be very small.
I agree with Jayson that it is not mandatory or wise to maximize hedons. And that is because hedons are not the only valuable things. But they do constitute one valuable category. And in seeking them, the total utilitarians are closer to the right approach than the average utilitarians (I will argue in a separate reply).
OK, I've got to ask: what's your confidence based in, in detail? It's not clear to me that "sum hedons" even means anything.