Understood. In that case, I disagree on this point.
most of us choose to indulge in pleasures that have no future utility (and in some cases have negative future utility) all the time. We eat junk food, watch TV, waste time watching cat videos. Things that would not obviously be missed if they could not be got.
Are you sure there's no future utility? Doesn't resisting these useless but pleasurable activities deplete the ego? Doesn't depleted ego lead to bad decision-making?
This is not to say that every time a parole judges eat a brownie it's because they're trying to protect their ability to make sound decisions, merely that I don't agree that it's the same as taking a vacation that totally evaporates when it's over.
Are you sure there's no future utility? Doesn't resisting these useless but pleasurable activities deplete the ego? Doesn't depleted ego lead to bad decision-making?
For at least some of the stuff I do, yes I'm sure. You can easily reduce this ego-depletion argument to absurdity by supposing that foregoing every minor indulgence is ego-depleting and that you should never deny yourself. Even that there exists some activity B with higher (expected) future utility than activity A, but lower present utility, which we sometimes nevertheless forego in favour o...
I don't think I understand the riddle of experience vs. memory. I would daresay that means the concept is half-baked.
Within the TED talk, Daniel Kahneman poses the probably familiar philosophical quandary: if you could take a beautiful vacation and afterwards your memory and photo album was completely erased, would you still do it? Whether you would still do it illustrates whether you live in service of the experiencing self instead of the remembering self.
Part of what prevents me from understanding the riddle is that I believe vacations are worth more than the memories and photos: vacations change you.
Maybe you could argue that this change is also a form of memory in service to the remembering self, but I'm not sure that's what he meant. In his thought experiment on vacations he asks if you would still take a vacation if, at the end of it, you forgot the whole thing and all of your photos were deleted.