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trinite0 t1_iwhcolt wrote

Reply to comment by RelativeCheesecake10 in Utilitarianism is the only option — but you have to take conscious experience seriously first by Squark09

Yes, and even if one considers humans simply as experiencers, we still have a whole lot of experiences that are not easily classifiable into either suffering or joy.

When I'm driving my car on an empty highway, not thinking about anything, and not really paying attention to the road, am I experiencing suffering, or joy? What about when I brush my teeth? What about when I'm in a meeting at work that's not exactly boring but not exactly interesting?

And, of course, there are a bunch of experiences that seem to be complicated mixtures of suffering and joy, and I'm not just talking about that Hellraiser stuff. When I read a stupid comment on Twitter that makes me mad but also makes me feel smarter than that dope, am I experiencing more suffering, or more joy? What about when I laugh at an offensive joke, while also feeling ashamed for laughing? What about when I go to a horror movie and get scared for fun?

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sener87 t1_iwhoexs wrote

I think the term you are looking for is indifference, it's like a zero on the scale between suffering and joy, not really a problem. Interpersonal comparisons, or how to value my joy relative to yours....

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trinite0 t1_iwhsp85 wrote

How does that help?

I think all of us would rather have "indifferent" experiences than have no experiences at all, which would imply that humans value experience in its own right, regardless of its "score" on this imaginary joy/suffering scale. In addition, all of these "indifferent" experiences can be distinguished from each other linguistically and cognitively, so they're not equivalent to one another. And people can have preferences from among these "indifferent" experiences along axes that are not obviously related to the concepts of "joy" and "suffering."

The point is that the evaluation and description of human experience is way, way more complicated than any utilitarian account can ever reflect, because people very often do not make their experiential choices based on a neatly articulable account of where they are located on the "joy/suffering" metric.

Let's go a bit further: how do we even distinguish "an experience" from a different "experience"?

Temporally? But we can experience a variety of different things at the same time.

Sensorially? But we can sense a variety of things at once, even with the same sense.

How about in memory? But our memories often are radically simplified narrative constructs of our experiences, with vast amounts of both sensory data and emotional response discarded, or they are inaccurate combinations of different events, or they include imaginary elements that we did not actually experience, etc.

I am eating a delicious steak dinner at Chili's. At the same time, I am listening to an irritating pop song on the radio. At the same time, I am thinking about a funny joke I heard earlier in the day. At the same time, I am looking at the ugly wallpaper in the Chili's. At the same time, I am being told by the waiter that a second plane has hit the Twin Towers. How many experiences am I having?

And then we have the further problem of varying levels of "reality" of experiences. Is remembering something very clearly a form of re-experiencing that event? If I intentionally, deliberately imagine something that did not actually happen, do I experience it? What about vicarious experience, when I watch something happen to someone else, and respond emotionally as though it were happening to me? What if I have a nightmare (that certainly seems like "suffering," but is it a real experience)?

So if we cannot even confidently define what "an experience" is, or how it can be distinguished from other "experiences," or how to assess the relationships between the different levels of reality of experiences, then how in the world can we rate them all on some kind of linear scale and assign points to them?

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sener87 t1_iwhuzht wrote

Well, technically there are some requirement for consistency, but they mostly boil down to a simple structure. As long as you are able to rank any two experiences relative to each other, the rest is sorted out by transitivity. The exact number of the utility score is not important, any order preserving transformation of the scale is equivalent for the choice/ranking. The question is therefore simply: can you choose between them? And indifference is allowed.

Multi-faceted experiences make such comparisons more difficult, for pretty much the same reason that comparing between experiences of different persons is difficult. There is not that big a conceptual difference between 'better in aspect A (food) but worse in B (pop song)' and 'better for person A (me) but worse for person B (you)'. The one thing I find so much harder about the interpersonal setting, there is no single actor to make the decision, while we can rely on the single actor to make the choice (even if it is indifference) in the multi-criterion setting.

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Squark09 OP t1_iwichxa wrote

> As long as you are able to rank any two experiences relative to each other, the rest is sorted out by transitivity.

This is key, I actually recall hearing about some Neuroscience research that showed that we actually do these kind of comparisons all the time and are quite good at distinguishing the relative valence of very mixed experiences

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trinite0 t1_iwih5j5 wrote

I'm more than happy to grant that people use an intuitive form of utilitarian judgment as a heuristic aid in decision-making. That's quite far from claiming, as the original article does, that utilitarianism can form an "ultimate ethical theory," or that conscious valence solves the "is/ought" problem in moral reasoning.

The fact is, the vast majority of the decisions that people make in their day-to-day lives don't really involve any reasoning at all, ethical or otherwise.

As an ethical theory, utilitarianism is, at best, a limited lens through which we can examine certain very simplified, highly circumscribed decisions, for points at which we have (or think we have) a far clearer understanding of the most likely consequences of an action than we do in normal circumstances.

This is why, I think, utilitarians seem to like thought experiments so much: it's much easier to formulate a utilitarian reasoning chain to decide dramatic imaginary scenarios than it is to apply it to normal daily behavioral decisions. Utilitarianism might be able to figure out whether it would be ethical to choose to annihilate the human race in nuclear fire, but it has a lot less to say about whether I should tell my kid to stop picking his nose.

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Squark09 OP t1_iwiq1rn wrote

As I say in the article, most of the time deontological or virtue ethics are actually a better bet for figuring out how to act. But that's just because they're a more efficient way of reasoning the best thing to do. In the end the thing that matters is the sum total of positive conscious experience

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trinite0 t1_iwir4yz wrote

There is no such thing as a "sum total of positive conscious experience." Why do you think there would be?

Or if there is, how could such a thing possibly be accessible to our limited, forgetful, mortal brains?

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Squark09 OP t1_iwic2sq wrote

I actually think if you pay more close attention (e.g. by training in meditation) you will see that there are no really neutral experiences, but there is also some kind of pleasantness in just existing without suffering.

It is true that the picture can be mixed though and it's not obvious how to treat that: see here for example https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bvtAXefTDQgHxc9BR/just-look-at-the-thing-how-the-science-of-consciousness

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