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davidpearce comments on Decision Theory FAQ - Less Wrong
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Heh. Yes, I remember reading the section on noradrenergic vs. dopaminergic motivation in Pearce's BLTC as a 16-year-old. I used to be a Pearcean, ya know, hence the Superhappies. But that distinction didn't seem very relevant to the metaethical debate at hand.
It's possible (I hope) to believe future life can be based on information-sensitive gradients of (super)intelligent well-being without remotely endorsing any of my idiosyncratic views on consciousness, intelligence or anything else. That's the beauty of hedonic recalibration. In principle at least, hedonic recalibration can enrich your quality of life and yet leave most if not all of your existing values and preference architecture intact .- including the belief that there are more important things in life than happiness.
Agreed. The conflict between the Superhappies and the Lord Pilot had nothing to do with different metaethical theories.
Also, we totally agree on wanting future civilization to contain very smart beings who are pretty happy most of the time. We just seem to disagree about whether it's important that they be super duper happy all of the time. The main relevance metaethics has to this is that once I understood there was no built-in axis of the universe to tell me that I as a good person ought to scale my intelligence as fast as possible so that I could be as happy as possible as soon as possible, I decided that I didn't really want to be super happy all the time, the way I'd always sort of accepted as a dutiful obligation while growing up reading David Pearce. Yes, it might be possible to do this in a way that would leave as much as possible of me intact, but why do it at all if that's not what I want?
There's also the important policy-relevant question of whether arbitrarily constructed AIs will make us super happy all the time or turn us into paperclips.
Huh, when I read the story, my impression was that it was Lord Pilot not understanding that it was a case of "Once you go black, you can't go back". Specifically, once you experience being superhappy, your previous metaethics stops making sense and you understand the imperative of relieving everyone of the unimaginable suffering of not being superhappy.