Ishaan comments on The best 15 words - Less Wrong

12 Post author: apophenia 03 October 2013 09:08AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (383)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Ishaan 06 October 2013 10:03:51PM *  -1 points [-]

Do you further agree that it follows from this that there is some hard limit to which it makes sense to self-modify to avoid certain negative emotions?

(We can replace the negative emotions with other processes that have the same behavioral effect, but making someone undergo said other processes would be morally equivalent to making them undergo a negative emotion, so there isn't a point in doing so)

Comment author: TheOtherDave 06 October 2013 11:25:56PM 0 points [-]

Do you further agree that it follows from this that there is some hard limit to which it makes sense to self-modify to avoid certain negative emotions?

I don't agree that it follows, no, though I do agree that there's probably some threshold above which losing the ability to experience the emotions we currently experience leaves us worse off.

I also don't agree that eliminating an emotion while adding a new process that preserves certain effects of that emotion which I value is equivalent (morally or otherwise) to preserving the emotion. More generally, I don't agree with your whole enterprise of equating emotions with utility shifts. They are different things.