X-Message-Number: 10167
Date: Sat, 1 Aug 1998 11:07:43 -0700
From: Tim Freeman <>
Subject: Re: What you OUGHT to do

From: Brook Norton <>
>I'll restate that the underlying assertion is (borrowing some from
>Ettinger) ** The only rational approach for anyone is to try to maximize
>personal happiness over future time, appropriately weighted.**

Two points: First, there are other entirely self-consistent choices;
and second, the "only rational approach" listed above doesn't work in
the long term.

First: Suppose that instead of deciding to maximize personal
happiness, I took as my highest goal to maximize the wealth of the
Catholic church, or the US Neo-Nazi movement, or whatever other
bizarre charity you want to imagine.  This is a pursuable goal.  There
isn't any contradiction there that I can see.  It is different from
the "only rational approach" listed above.  By what criterion is it
irrational?  There are people who really do things like this.

Second: As time passes, you will live in an environment that is
progressively more different from the environment in which you
evolved.  The part of your brain that decides whether you are happy is
relatively small and can be fooled into deciding that useless things
make you happy.  As technolgy advances, there will be more ways to
fool it, and market pressures will cause them to be developed, since a
product that makes someone happy will be easy to sell.  For instance,
suppose a brain can be rewired so the person is happy.  Then, if
happiness is your highest goal, you may find yourself paying for the
rewiring and arranging an endowment for perpetual medical care, and
then spending the rest of eternity in drooling bliss.

For a more immediate example, there is apparently a small fraction of
the population for whom heroin is the most wonderful thing in the
world.  It makes them happy.  I haven't bothered to find out if I'm in
that segment of the population because I don't have happiness as a
goal.  It seems to me that the people here who do have happiness as a
goal should, as part of pursuing their goal, check this out to see if
it makes them happy, but I suspect few of them have.  Why not?
(Disclaimer: if this paradox persuades you of something, I would
prefer that you change your goals instead of try heroin.)

In general, one should define one's goals in terms of things external
to oneself.  Otherwise one can achieve those goals by making otherwise
useless changes to yourself.
-- 
Tim Freeman       
            http://www.infoscreen.com/resume.html
Web-centered Java, Perl, and C++ programming in Silicon Valley or offsite

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