= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Pablo_Stafforini comments on Crossing the experiments: a baby - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (90)
My point was that your favorite theory cannot make sense of what people take themselves to be doing in situations such as those discussed above. You may argue that we shouldn't trust these people because introspection is not trustworthy, but then you'd be effectively biting the bullet.
You may, of course, use the verb 'to be bothered' to mean 'judging a state to be inferior to some alternative.' However, I though you were using the verb to mean, instead, the experiencing of some negative hedonic state. I agree that there is something that "bothers you", in the former sense, about the above situation, but I disagree that this must be so if the term is used in the latter sense--which is the sense relevant for discussions of negative utilitarianism.
I think that wanting to change your current state is identical with what we generally mean by being in a negative hedonic state. For reasons outlined above, I suspect that qualia aren't indepent of all the other stuff that is going on (attitudes, dispositions, memories etc.).
Studies by Kent Berridge have established that 'wanting' can be dissociated from 'liking'. This research finding (among others; Guy Kahane discusses some of these) undermines the claim that affective qualia are intextricably linked to intentional attitudes, as you seem to suggest.
I'm aware of these findings, I think there are different forms of "wanting" and we might have semantical misunderstandings here. There is pleasure that causes immediate cravings if you were to stop it, and there is pleasure that does not. So pleasure would usually cause you to want it again, but not always. I would not say that only the former is "real" pleasure. Instead I'm arguing that a frustrated craving due to the absence of some desired pleasure constitutes suffering. I'm only committed to the claim that "disliking" implies (or means) "wanting to get out" of the current state. And I think this makes perfect sense given the arguments of inverted qualia / against epiphenomenalism and my intuitive response to the case of pain asymbolia.
Negative utilitarianism is a normative theory, not a descriptive one.
This is true. But some descriptive facts may provide evidence against a normative theory. The implicit argument was:
Of course, the argument is by no means decisive. In fact, I think there are much stronger objections to NU.
I'm not sure of what this even means. Negative utilitarianism implies one set of preferences, which not everyone shares. People who have different preferences aren't mistaken in any sense, they just want different things.