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rationalnoodles comments on Open thread, 30 June 2014- 6 July 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I really don't like happiness as a terminal value, yet I don't know anything that can replace it. The only thing I can think of is satisfaction, but it appears to be just a sneaky way to say happiness.
Any ideas?
You don't like having it at all, or you just don't consider it the sole value?
I tend to see satisfaction referring to preference-satisfaction, meaning that a person's goals are satisfied, but not implying that they know this. If you are a paperclip maximizer, and the universe is tiled with paperclips, but you don't think there's a such thing as a paperclip, you may not be very happy, but your preferences are satisfied.
I have nothing against happiness per se, it just doesn't feel like a proper terminal value.
Most of positive psychology views well-being as a much more robust concept than just happiness. See for example Martin Seligman's PERMA theory, although that doesn't seem to be the only theory out there.
Power?
"Humans act as if they had power as a terminal value" probably matches reality better than "Humans act as if they had happiness as a terminal value".
My original suggestion was "knowledge", but that may make you equally value knowing Pokemon trivia - I value useful knowledge, not any old knowledge, which seems to be another way of saying I value (a form of) power.
Though also, I don't see much of a reason to care about "terminal values" except when talking about maths and economics and decision theories and the like - any talk of "terminal values" is highly uncertain and likely to be wrong, so it's not something I'd take to heart.
That feels too much like lost purposes. "Power" refers to something that can be used to fulfill values in general.
It's the sort of thing you'd acquire if you haven't figured out what you really want.
You should watch House of Cards.
Preferences revealed through e.g. Wikipedia's history suggest that people put a surprisingly high value on Pokemon trivia relative to more useful but less entertaining information, at least when it comes to investing time in compiling and reading it.
Why don't you like happiness as a terminal value?
I would say "supplement" rather than "replace". How about beauty, love, friendship, music, humor, sex... ?
Eudaimonia.
Some further thoughts about eudaimonia. What is happiness? I suggest that happiness is, literally, what it feels like to live well.
An analogy with pain: why does pain hurt? If it's a warning, why can't it just be a warning, without the hurting that seems so unnecessary? Because the painfulness of pain is the warning. You might wish that, like a fire alarm, it wouldn't go off when there's no fire, or you could turn it off when there's nothing more to do about the fire. There are drugs that will turn off pain, but for everyday purposes you can't take the painfulness out of the pain because then you'll be in the situation of children born without the ability to feel pain at all. They usually get dreadful injuries, wear out their joints, and end up crippled. You won't heed the warnings because they won't be warnings any more. How good are people at heeding milder warnings like "yet another game of 2048 would be a really stupid waste of time", or "I notice that I am confused"? If pain was that mild a warning, people would ignore it, because that is what a minor warning feels like from inside. Pain is what an urgent warning of physical damage feels like from inside.
In the same way, happiness is what living well feels like from inside. It's like a meter reading on a control panel. The meter reading is telling you how well you're doing, and happiness is what a high reading on that meter feels like.
You want that reading to be high, but there's no point in grabbing hold of the meter needle and turning it all the way over to the right. It would be as futile as living on morphine to take the painfulness out of ordinarily functioning pain. Or like satisfying a desire for an Olympic medal by making one -- the medal itself isn't what you really wanted, but the achievement of winning one. Or like keeping a nuclear reactor running smoothly by disconnecting all the sensors and replacing them by fake signals saying everything's fine.
Happiness tells you how well you're living. It only looks like a goal in the context of a well-functioning system that doesn't deliver the sensation without achieving the real goals that the sensation is measuring your approach to. If you obtain the signal without the reality, as I've heard that crack cocaine does, your life will fall apart.