You can value other things than actions themselves and the pleasure they bring. Maybe you like choosing and planning and acting. Maybe you like solving complex problems. Maybe you like variety (laughter and food and discovery and music, rather than the best out of four) and complexity. Maybe you like growing and learning. Maybe you like creating things. Maybe you like overcoming obstacles. Maybe you like exchanging ideas with other minds and bulding relationships and helping. Maybe you like intricate webs of feelings that aren't all pleasant but are made more enjoyable because they're bittersweet or frightening or weird.
So you'll select activities that maximize that and your zillion other values, not just activities that maximize pleasure. But there's no particular reason why current activities should be optimal. The pleasure of scratching an itch is unique, and somewhat complex. I wouldn't trade it for, say, a more intense copy of the pleasure of eating a potato chip - I already have that one. But I would trade it for a different, more intense, more complex pleasure.
But I would trade it for a different, more intense, more complex pleasure.
Which is my thesis: outside of denying change, the only two dimension under which is significant to find an improvement are intensity and complexity. However your position appears to me not to be reflectively consistent: after all, you could consider the complexity and intensity of your whole human experience and be seduced by a different, more complex, more intense type of existence.
This post is a formal request for everybody in this forum, who are the most likely humans to produce an FAI in the future, that in the possible resulting utopia some activity will still be available, even if they are not based on challenges of increasing complexity. I call these activity natural wireheadings, and since it is my right to determine my own fun-generating activities, I hereby formally request that some simple pleasure, listened below, will still be available at *any* point in my future cone, and that I will consider a dystopia any future which deprives me of these natural wireheadings (if anyone is still around caring for those things).
A (non-exhaustive) list of them includes the following:
- sex
- eating food/drinking
- feeling relieved for having emptied my bowels
- dancing
- the pleasure of physical activity (wood-carving, sculpting, running, etc)
- the rapture I feel when in the presence of a safe ancestral environment
- social laughter
- the pleasure of talking in a small, same-minded crowd
- listening to pop/metal/rap music
- the pleasure of resting when tired
- scratching an itch
-...
More will come!