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blacktrance comments on What are your contrarian views? - Less Wrong Discussion
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There's a lot of things that people are capable of preferring that's not pleasure, the question is whether it's what they should prefer.
Awfully presumptuous of you to tell people what they should prefer.
Why? We do this all the time, when we advise people to do something different from what they're currently doing.
No, we don't. That's making recommendations as to how they can attain their preferences. That you don't seem to understand this distinction is concerning. Instrumental and terminal values are different.
My position is in line with that - people are wrong about what their terminal values are, and they should realize that their actual terminal value is pleasure.
Why is my terminal value pleasure? Why should I want it to be?
Fundamentally, because pleasure feels good and preferable, and it doesn't need anything additional (such as conditioning through social norms) to make it desirable.
Why should I desire what you describe? What's wrong with values more complex than a single transistor?
Also, naturalistic fallacy.
It's not a matter of what you should desire, it's a matter of what you'd desire if you were internally consistent. Theoretically, you could have values that weren't pleasure, such as if you couldn't experience pleasure.
Also, the naturalistic fallacy isn't a fallacy, because "is" and "ought" are bound together.
Why is the internal consistency of my preferences desirable, particularly if it would lead me to prefer something I am rather emphatically against?
Why should the way things are be the way things are?
Can you define 'terminal values', in the context of human beings?
Terminal values are what are sought for their own sake, as opposed to instrumental values, which are sought because they ultimately produce terminal values.
I know what terminal values are and I apologize if the intent behind my question was unclear. To clarify, my request was specifically for a definition in the context of human beings - that is, entities with cognitive architectures with no explicitly defined utility functions and with multiple interacting subsystems which may value different things (ie. emotional vs deliberative systems). I'm well aware of the huge impact my emotional subsystem has on my decision making. However, I don't consider it 'me' - rather, I consider it an external black box which interacts very closely with that which I do identify as me (mostly my deliberative system). I can acknowledge the strong influence it has on my motivations whilst explicitly holding a desire that this not be so, a desire which would in certain contexts lead me to knowingly make decisions that would irreversibly sacrifice a significant portion of my expected future pleasure.
To follow up on my initial question, it had been intended to lay the groundwork for this followup: What empirical claims do you consider yourself to be making about the jumble of interacting systems that is the human cognitive architecture when you say that the sole 'actual' terminal value of a human is pleasure?
That upon ideal rational deliberation and when having all the relevant information, a person will choose to pursue pleasure as a terminal value.