I really do want to make a distinction between pleasurable things and terminally-valuable things, though. At least I think I do.
I'm missing a description of what those terminally-valuable goals might be, though.
I think it would be unfortunate if future civilizations decided maximum wireheading was the greatest ethical good.
I agree. But the fundamental question: what is the good of Man? is going unanswered. As it mostly has done on LessWrong, even in the Sequences. We spend our whole lives on two things: overcoming problems, and enjoying ourselves. Bread (the struggle to procure it) and circuses. In Paradise, the problems are gone, the bread is free; is anything left but lotus-eating?
I don't have an answer to that either. One can talk about "eudaimonia", or "flourishing", or as Eliezer does, "fun", but those are just names for whatever it is.
But casting this in terms of Paradise, whether the transhuman one or a religious one, removes the problem from the world around us and too easily leads into empty speculation. When you leave aside the irksome chores of keeping your body fed, clothed, and housed, and the rejected pleasures listed previously, what purposes should get someone out of bed in the morning? And when they are achieved, what then? Is there, in fact, such a thing as a terminal goal?
(I find it quite amusing that I'm getting push-back on the ice cream thing.)
gjm said that it's "basically sugar and fat, neither of which is very good for your health when consumed in large quantities". But the dose makes the poison; fat is an essential macronutrient, and carbohydrates all but.
I'm sceptical of the whole superstimulus idea, based partly on personal experience and partly on an understanding of control systems. I hinted at the former in speaking of having had an ice-cream "as recently as a month ago". People speak of chocolate as another superstimulus. There's usually a 200g block of Cadbury's Fruit and Nut in my store cupboard. A block lasts about a month and is only there for quasi-medicinal purposes, to alleviate low blood sugar crashes (of causes unknown). From the point of view of control systems, if your satiety-sensing system is in order, you will never overeat. The "attractiveness" of food is irrelevant. I don't care how "enjoyable" something is to eat, if I'm already full it is effortless to decline to eat more, and repugnant to do otherwise. Whatever is going wrong in the current surge of obesity, it isn't extraordinarily attractive food.
Whatever is going wrong in the current surge of obesity, it isn't extraordinarily attractive food.
Yeah, that's true.
I agree. But the fundamental question: what is the good of Man? is going unanswered.
In terms of it going unanswered in the Sequences or wider lesswrong, I somewhat disagree. The sequences specifically argue that good is complex and fragile -- complex meaning it would take a long time to write down all the details and they can't just be summarized with a pattern that gives rise to them; fragile meaning that we need to get all the detail...
Epistemic status: playing devil's advocate.
I wrote the following a couple of weeks back for a meet-up post, and Gunnar_Zarncke suggested I should turn it into a discussion post:
Fiction is not a lie, but it is a variety of untruth. It absorbs time and energy which could be spent on fact. Although we make a conscious distinction between fictional worlds and reality, we will often use fictional examples when evaluating real-life situations. It has been argued that we should learn to take joy in the world we actually live in. Why should we allow fiction to warp our view of reality?
Perhaps fiction offers a fun, relaxing break. I can understand this claim in two different ways. The first version is that reading fiction gives us a rest from serious thinking, restoring us in some way. So, is this really true? Often when we feel tired of thinking, we're really tired of thinking about some particular thing. We gain new mental energy when we switch to something else. We think this means we're unable to do productive work, and need to take a break; but often, we could continue to be productive on a sufficiently different task, which gave us the same variety as a "break" would. (This is anecdotal. I recall seeing a discussion of this in a lesswrong post, but didn't figure out which one.) Alternatively, if we really are exhausted, reading fiction might not be restoring our energy as much as taking a nap or perhaps meditating. In either case, the pro-fiction argument seems murky. Answering this question is difficult, because it's far from obvious why certain types of thinking seem to take "mental effort" and leave us feeling drained. (It seems it might be a mechanism for sensing high opportunity cost, or it might be due to depleting a physical resource in the brain.)
A second way to interpret this is that consuming fiction is closer to being an end, rather than a means. The joy which fiction creates, or the rich inner experience, may be a good in and of itself. Whether it's useful for restorative purposes or not, it's good that society keeps churning the fiction mill, because it's one of the things which makes lifeworthwhile. Some people will readily agree with this, while others will feel it's very close to advocating wireheading. At a recent LW meetup here in LA, one person argued that if you're going to enjoy living in some universe, it might as well be the real one. I suppose the idea is that we should seek to make the enjoyable aspects of fiction into a reality, rather than exercising shallow escapism. I'm not sure this view can be defended, however. If you've got something like a computational theory of mind, and believe that uploading yourself into a virtual world is OK, how do you draw a firm line between "reality" and "fiction" to say which kinds of experiences are really valuable and in which you're just fooling yourself? Is it a matter of a sufficiently detailed simulation, which includes other conscious beings rather than puppets, and so on?
Maybe...
Robin Hanson discusses the social value of stories: those who read fiction are more empathetic toward others, seemingly fooled by story logic into acting as if good behavior is always rewarded and bad behavior punished. Although clearly valuable, this gives me the uneasy sense that stories are manipulative control directives. I mayenjoy the story, but does that make me comfortable accepting control directives from this particular author? Or should we examine the moral character of the author, before reading?
To make our arguments stick, we've got to compare fiction to relevant alternatives. It seems to me that we can havealmost as much fun reading biographies, memoirs, and (entertainingly written) history as we can reading fiction... and all with the advantage of being real facts about the real world, which seems at least a little useful.