If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Now change a variable: Food is no longer necessary for humans to live ... In this hypothetical, I would consider the desire to eat very selfish and suboptimal - it consumes resources of all kinds, including time that the individual could be spending on other things!
You haven't answered an important question: what are you optimizing for?
In your hypothetical eating (for pure hedonics) does consume resources including time, but you have neglected to show that this is not a good use of these resources. Yes, they can be spent on other things but why these other things are more valuable than the hedonics of eating?
What is the yardstick that you apply to outcomes to determine whether they are suboptimal or not?
The desire is purely emotional, individuals without it usually actually function better than their counterparts in situations where it is relevant
8-0 That's an unexpected approach. Are you pointing out the "purely emotional" part in a derogatory sense? Is having emotional desires, err... suboptimal?
What do you mean by individuals without such emotional desires functioning "better"? Are emotions a crippling disability?
I am comparing across utility systems, so my best yardsticks are intuition and a vague idea of strength of hedons + psychological utilon estimates as my best approximation of per-person-utility.
I do realize this makes little formal sense considering that the problem of comparing different utility functions with different units is completely unresolved, but it's not like we can't throw balls in we don't understand physics.
So what I'm really optimizing for is a weighted or normalized "evaluation", on the theoretical assumption that this is possibl...