More thought:
Our emotions are in some sense the human equivalent of "utility functions".
We don't hate the suffering of other people in some abstract way - we hate the suffering of other people because it causes us pain to think about other people suffering. We love truth because of that rush of satisfaction upon hitting upon it.
Yes, we intrinsically prefer pleasure over pain, but that's only part of the story. We also prefer the causes of satisfaction to happen, beyond preferring the feeling of satisfaction itself. We hate the causes of pain beyond the extent to which we hate the actual feeling of pain itself.
You can't really replace the more abstract negative affects with a warning signal, because the negative affect was the reason you hated, say, deception, in the first place. Replacing negative affect in response to deception would be akin to removing part of the preference against deception.
That's why sociopaths don't care about people. They don't feel guilt. You could tell them "this is where you would ordinarily feel guilty, if we hadn't removed your negative affect associated with hurting people" but they aren't going to care about the warning signal. Maybe some past version of themselves who hadn't had negative affect removed might have cared, but they will not.
Negative affect is the switch that tells the brain "don't do things that cause that'. Removing negative affect would actually remove the perception of negative utility. For simple bodily pain, who cares...but you're going to start altering values if you mess with any of the more abstract stuff.
So, when we radically alter our emotions, don't we also radically alter our "utility functions"? I'd like future-me's interests to generally align with current-me's coherent extrapolated interests.
we hate the suffering of other people because it causes us pain to think about other people suffering.
It seems to me that I negatively value other people's suffering... I want there to be less of it.
Given the choice between reducing their suffering and reducing the pain I feel upon contemplating their suffering, it seems to me I ought to reduce their suffering.
Given the option of reducing their suffering at the cost of experiencing just as much pain when I contemplate their lack of suffering as I do now when I contemplate their suffering, it see...
People want to tell everything instead of telling the best 15 words. They want to learn everything instead of the best 15 words. In this thread, instead post the best 15-words from a book you've read recently (or anything else). It has to stand on its own. It's not a summary, the whole value needs to be contained in those words.
I'll start in the comments below.
(Voted by the Schelling study group as the best exercise of the meeting.)