[ExI] "Brave New World" is a nasty book

[Stathis Papaioannou]

2010/1/27 John Clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net>:

> I think any intelligent being is going to have something like a
> happiness-sadness scale, and if we had complete control of it there would be
> great perhaps overwhelming temptation to open our personal preferences
> control panel and push that happiness slide switch as far right as it will
> go. And rather than accomplish something important to get that agreeable
> feeling of pride and satisfaction just crank up that feeling directly and
> don't bother accomplishing anything at all.

But if we had complete control of our brains we could arrange it so
that the happiness is coupled to some activity we consider
intrinsically interesting (Pearce talks about being motivated by
gradients of pleasure rather than pleasure/pain). We could also
arrange it so that we are not tempted to pervert this mechanism.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou