Alright, let's say I agree that in the space of all possible activities there exist some pleasurable activities that have zero future utility.
Couldn't we die at any minute? Given this, shouldn't we always do the pleasurable thing so long as there's no negative utility and no opportunity cost because there's a small chance it'll be the last thing we do?
Doesn't choosing the beautiful vacation that evaporates when it's over have the benefit that if we die in the middle of it, life was just that much more pleasant?
I guess I don't understand why someone would choose not to take the vacation.
shouldn't we always do the pleasurable thing so long as there's no negative utility and no opportunity cost
The problem with this (I think, I'm not that hot on decision theory) is that you can pretty much never assign an opportunity cost of zero to an activity unless your life depends on it, as would be the case for breathing. For as long as we're given no reason to believe our life will end at any particular point, you have to calculate your opportunity costs on the assumption that you'll continue to live. At least, it seems that way in the general case...
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.