Closed time loop

Imagine two scenarios:

1. An infinitely long life of repetition of a session meaningful pleasure followed by a memory wipe.

2. A closed time loop involving one session of the meaningful pleasure followed by a memory wipe.

Scenario (1) involves infinitely many sessions of the meaningful pleasure. This seems better than having only one session as in (2). But subjectively, I have a hard time feeling any preference for (1). In both cases, you have your pleasure, and it’s true that you will have it again.

I suppose this is some evidence that we’re not meant to live in a closed time loop. :-)

Trope theory and merely numerical differences in pleasures

Suppose I eat a chocolate bar and this causes me to have a trope of pleasure. Given assentiality of origins, if I had eaten a numerically different chocolate bar that caused the same pleasure, I would have had had a numerically different trope of pleasure.

Now, imagine that I eat a chocolate bar in my right hand and it causes me to have a trope of pleasure R, and immediately as I have finished eating that one chocolate bar, I switch to eating the chocolate bar in my left hand, which gives me an exactly similar trope of pleasure, L, with no temporal gap. Nonetheless, by essentiality of origins, trope L is numerically distinct from trope R.

To some (perhaps Armstrong) this will seem absurd. But I think it’s exactly right. In fact, I think it may even an argument for trope theory. For it seems pretty plausible that as I switch chocolate bars, something changes in me: I go from one pleasure to another exactly like it. But on heavy-weight Platonism, there is no change: I instantiated pleasure and now I instantiate pleasure. On non-trope nominalism, likewise there is no change. It’s trope theory that gives us the change here.

The good of competent achievement

One of the ways we flourish is by achievement: by successfully fulfilling a plan of action and getting the intended end. But it seems that there is a further thing here of some philosophical interest: we can distinguish achievement from competent achievement.

For me, the phenomenon shows up most clearly when I engage in (indoor) rock climbing. In the case of a difficult route, I first have to try multiple times before I can “send” the route, i.e., climb it correctly with no falls. That is an achievement. But often that first send is pretty sketchy in that it includes moves where it was a matter of chance whether I would get the move or fall. I happened to get it, but next time I do it, I might not. There is something unsatisfying about the randomness here, even though technically speaking I have achieved the goal.

There is then a further step in mastery where with further practice, I not only happened to get the moves right, but do so competently and reliably. And while there is an intense jolt of pleasure at the initial sketchy achievement, there is a kind of less intense but steadier pleasure at competent achievement. Similar things show up in other physical pursuits: there is the first time one can do n pull-ups, and that’s delightful, but there is there time when one can do n pull-ups whenever one wants to, and that has a different kind of pleasure. Video games can afford a similar kind of pleasure.

That said, eventually the joy of competent achievement fades, too, when one’s skill level rises far enough above it. I can with competence and reliability run a 15 minute mile, but there is no joy in that, because it is too easy. It seems that what we enjoy here has a tension to it: competent achievement of something that is still fairly hard for us. There is also a kind of enjoyment of competent achievement of something that is hard for others but easy for us, but that doesn’t feel quite so virtuous.

There is a pleasure for others in watching an athlete doing something effortlessly (which is quite different from “they make it look effortless”, when in fact we may know that there is quite a bit of effort in it), but I think the hedonic sweet spot for the athlete does not lie in the effortless performance, but in a competent but still challenging performance.

And here is a puzzle. God’s omnipotence not only makes God capable of everything, but makes God capable of doing everything easily. Insofar as we are in the image and likeness of God, it would seem that the completely effortless should be the greater good for us than the challenging. Maybe, though, the fact that our achievements are infinitely below God’s activity imposes on our lives a temporal structure of striving for greater achievements that makes the completely effortless a sign that we haven’t pushed ourselves enough.

All this stuff, of course, mirrors familiar debates between Kantians and virtue ethicists about moral worth.

Is it prudent to start drinking alcohol?

Here is an interesing exercise in decision theory.

Suppose (as is basically the case for me, if one doesn’t count chocolates with alcohol or the one or two spoonfuls of wine that my parents gave me as a kid to allay my curiosity) I am a man who never drunk alcohol. Should I?

Well, 6.8% of American males 12 and up suffer from alcoholism. And 83% of American males 12 and up report having drunk alcohol. It follows that the probability of developing alcoholism after drinking is around 8%, whle the probability of developing alcoholism without drinking is around 0%.

Family history might provide one with some reason to think that in one’s own case the statistics on developing would be more pessimistic or more optimistic, but let’s suppose that family history does not provide significant data one way or another.

So, the question is: are the benefits of drinks containing alcohol worth an 8% chance of alcoholism?

Alcoholism is a very serious side-effect. It damages people’s moral lives in significant ways, besides having serious physical health repercussions. The moral damage is actually more worrying to me than the physical health repercussions, both because of the direct harms to self and the indirect harms to others, but the physical health considerations are easier to quantify. Alcoholism reduces life expectancy by about 30%. Thus, developing alcoholism is like getting a 30% chance of instant death at a very young age. Hence, the physical badness of facing an 8% chance of developing alcoholism is like a young child’s facing a 2.4% chance of instant death.

At this point, I think, we can get some intuitions going. Imagine that a parent is trying to decide whether their child should have an operation that has about a 2.4% chance of death. There definitely are cases where it would be reasonable to go for such an operation. But here is one that is not. Suppose that the child has a condition that makes them unable to enjoy any food that has chocolate in it—the chocolate is harmless to them, but it renders the food containing it pleasureless. There is a childhood operation that can treat this condition, but about one in forty children who have the operation die on the operating table. It seems to me clear that parents should refuse this operation and doctors should not offer it, despite the fact that chocolate has great gustatory pleasures associated it. Indeed, I think it is unlikely that the medical profession would approve of the operation.

But I doubt that alcohol’s morally legitimate pleasures exceed those of chocolate.

I said that the moral ills of alcoholism are larger than the physical, but harder to quantify. Still, we can say something. If the physical badness of an 8% chance of alcoholism is like a young child’s facing a 2.4% chance of instant death, and there is a worse moral effect, it follows that the overall badness of an 8% chance of alcoholism is at least as bad as a young child’s facing a 5% chance of instant death. And with a one in twenty chance of death, there are very few operations we would be willing to have performed on a child or ourselves. The operation would have to correct a very dangerous or a seriously debilitating condition. And alcohol does neither.

This suggests to me that if the only information one has is that one is male, the risk of alcoholism is sufficient that the virtue of prudence favors not starting to drink. If one is female, the risk is smaller, but it still seems to me to be sufficiently large for prudence to favor not starting to drink.

There are limitations of the above argument. If one has already started drinking, one may have additional data that goes beyond the base rates of alcoholism—for instance, one may know that in twenty years of drinking, one has not had any serious problems with moderation, in which case the argument does not apply (but of course one might also have data that makes alcoholism a more likely outcome than at the base rate). Similarly, one might have data from family history showing that the danger of alcoholism is smaller than average or from one’s own personal history showing that one lacks the “addictive personality” (but in the latter case, one must beware of self-deceit).

I am a little suspicious of the above arguments because of the Church’s consistent message, clearly tied to Jesus’s own practice, that the drinking of alcohol is intrinsically permissible.

It may be that I am overly cautious in thinking which degree of risk prudence bids us to avoid. Perhaps one thing to say is that while there are serious reasons of prudence not to start drinking, I may be underestimating the weight of the benefits of drinking.

I also think the utilities were different in the past. If spices and chocolate are unavailable or prohibitively expensive, wine might be the main gustatory pleasure available to one, and so the loss of gustatory pleasure would be a more serious loss. Likewise, alcoholic drinks may have health benefits over unsafe drinking water. Finally, even now, one might live in a cultural setting where there are few venues for socialization other than over moderate alcoholic consumption.

Of course, in my own case there are also hedonic reasons not to drink alcoholic drinks: the stuff smells like a disinfectant.

The pace of reception of goods

Suppose I know that from now on for an infinite number of years, I will be offered an annual game. A die will be rolled, I will be asked to guess whether the die will show six, and if I guess right, I will get a slice of delicious chocolate cake (one of my favorite foods).

Intuitively, I rationally should guess “Not a six”, and thereby get a 5/6 chance of the prize instead of the 1/6 chance if I guess “Six”.

But suppose that instead of the prizes being slices of chocolate cake, there is an infinite supply of delightful and varied P. G. Wodehouse novels (he’s one of my favorite authors), numbered 1, 2, 3, …, and each prize is the opportunity to read the next one. Moreover, the pleasure of reading book n after book n − 1 is the same regardless of whether the interval in between is longer or shorter, there being advantages and disadvantages of each interval that cancel out (at shorter intervals, one can make more literary connections between novels and remember the recurring characters a little better; but at longer intervals, one’s hunger for Wodehouse will have grown).

Now, it is clear that there is no benefit to guessing “Not a six” rather than “Six”. For whatever I guess, I am going to read every book eventually, and the pace at which I read them doesn’t seem prudentially relevant.

At this point, I wonder if I should revise my statement that in the cake case I should guess “Not a six”. I really don’t know. I can make the cake case seem just like the book case: There is an infinite supply of slices of cake, frozen near-instantly in liquid helium and numbered 1, 2, 3, …, and each time I win, I get the next slice. So it seems that whatever I do, I will eat each slice over eternity. So what difference does it make that if I guess “Not a six”, I will eat the slices at a faster pace?

On the other hand, it feels that when the pleasures are not merely equal in magnitude but qualitatively the same as in the cake case, the higher pace does matter. Imagine a non-random version where I choose between getting the prize every year and getting it every second year. Then on the every-second-year plan, the prize days are a proper subset of the prize days on the every-year plan. In the cake case, that seems to be all that matters, and so the every-year plan is better. But in the Wodehouse case, this consideration is undercut by the fact that each pleasure is different in sort, because I said the novels are varied, and I get to collect one of each regardless of which installment plan I choose.

Here is another reason to think that in the cake case, the pace matters: It clearly matters in the case of non-varied pain. It is clearly better to have a tooth pulled every two years than every year. But what about varied torture from a highly creative KGB officer? Can’t I say that on either installment plan, I get all the tortures, so neither plan is worse than the other? That feels like the wrong thing to say: the every-second-year plan still seems better even if the tortures are varied.

I am fairly confident that in the novel case—and especially if the novels continue to be varied—the pace doesn’t matter, and so in the original game version, it doesn’t matter how I gamble. I am less confident of what to say about the cake version, but the torture case pushes me to say that in the cake version, the pace does matter.

Ataraxia

The stoics, the academic sceptics and the epicureans all to various degrees basically agreed—or at least largely lived as if they agreed—that happiness was ataraxia, imperturbable calm and tranquility. This is a useful and important corrective to our busy work and busy “leisure”. But at the sme time, it’s really a quite empty and negative picture of life’s fulfillment. It’s more like a picture of how to get done with life without too much misery.

Perhaps they had a part of the truth: perhaps what is truly worth having is imperturbably, calmly and tranquilly doing certain things, such as enjoying the companionship of those we love—God above all. But the ataraxia is just a mode of the worthwhile activity rather than the center of it.

Furthermore, perhaps these ancients were extensionally right: for perhaps the only way to have ataraxia is by being with God, since our hearts are restless apart from him. In that case, ataraxia isn’t happiness, or worth pursuing for its own sake, but is a sign of happiness.

Slowing down pleasures and pains, once again

If suddenly everything in game and in my brain slowed down while I was having a good time playing Asteroids, my conscious sequence wouldn’t be subjectively affected, and the hedonic value of the game would not change in any way. It would just take proportionately longer to get the same overall hedonic value.

But this leads to a paradox. Suppose that I am experiencing an approximately constant moderate pleasure for five minutes, and you experience that pleasure for ten minutes. Then, obviously, you get approximately twice the hedonic value. But one way to make it be the case that you experience the same pleasure for ten minutes is just to slow down all of your life by a factor of two. And yet such a slowdown should not affect hedonic value.

I think I previously thought that one way out of this paradox was to suppose that time is discrete. But I don’t think so any more. In fact, it seems to me that making time be discrete makes the paradox worse. For in your slowed-down ten minutes of pleasure, there will be twice as many pleasurable moments of time, which should predict, contrary to the intuition I began with, that you will have twice the hedonic value. Granted, if time is discrete, there will be some technical difficulties with how the slowdown happens at very short time-scales. But that doesn’t matter for us, since if time is discrete, it is discrete on a Planck scale, which is way below any time-scales relevant to my enjoying a game of Asteroids. And we need not imagine any weird “microphysics slowing down” for the thought experiment: it suffices that the computer software slow down by a factor of two and that you be given drugs that make your brain work more sluggishly than mine.

A different way to try to solve the problem is to suppose that there is some kind of a clock in my brain, and that only states at a clock tick are pleasurable. Thus, if your life is slowed down by a favor of two, then that clock will slow down, and in ten minutes of your enjoying Asteroids there will be the same number of pleasurable ticks as in me, and so you will get the same total pleasure.

But this is tricky. Whatever process is generating the clock ticks in our brains is presumably a fairly continuous analog process. Thus, there will be no such thing as an instantaneous tick of the clock. Rather, there will be an extended period of time (on a time-scale many orders of magnitude above the Planck scale, so any discreteness of physical time will be irrelevant) at which the tick occurs. (Think of a physical clock ticking. The tick is a sound that occurs every second for a fraction of a second—but that fraction is non-zero.) So if I am having pleasure during the tick and you’re having pleasure during the tick, since your tick takes twice as long, it seems you have twice as much pleasure.

I can think of only one way out of the paradox right now, and that is to deny that it makes sense to talk of there being a pleasure or a pain at an instantaneous physical time. Rather, pleasures and pains (and presumably other qualia) always occur over an interval of times. The clock toy model can now be rescued. For we could say that what counts is a pleasurable or painful tick, but if the tick itself is shortened or extended, the hedonic value does not actually change. Let’s imagine that the clock works like some processor clocks. There is an electric square wave generated somewhere, and the ticks are the transitions from a high to a low voltage. Since real-life “square wave” isn’t actually square, but has transitions with wobbly smooth edges, the ticking—i.e., the transition from high to low—takes time. What makes it be the case that one has experienced a pleasure or pain during an interval of times is that this interval contained a clock transition from high to low together with some further state that is not itself pleasurable or painful but that, when combined with the clock transition, constitutes the pleasure or pain. The number of pains or pleasures during a period of time is the number of such transitions.

If one slows down the system, the clock transitions become slower. But the number of clock transitions is unchanged, as is the number of pleasurable or painful clock transitions. Thus there is no change in overall hedonic value.

But notice that on this toy model it is never true that one is experiencing a pleasure or pain at an instant. For there is no transition from high to low clock state at an instant. Transitions happen over an interval of times. This will bother presentists.

The above line of thought assumed supervenience of the mental on the physical. But a robust dualism faces the same problems of slowing down and speeding up, and the fundamental idea of the solution, that pleasures and pains are constituted by essentially temporally extended processes and that there are no instantaneous pleasures or pains, is still available.

Presentism and adding up pains and pleasures

A year of moderate pleasure is worth paying a second of intense pain for.

An eternalist explains this in the obvious straightforward way: the total pleasure you experience on this deal is more than the total pain.

But for the presentist, at any time during the pain, you just have the pain. You will have the pleasure, but it’s not a part of reality and hence of your life. And at any time during the pleasure, you just have the moment of pleasure, but because it’s moderate, it’s not enough to offset the past pain.

What we want is an explanation of why it makes sense—as it obviously does—to add up the pains and pleasures over a lifetime. For the eternalist, since all of them are a part of reality, adding seems to make a lot of sense. But for the presentist, it is really unclear why you should add unreal things to real things to get a “total benefit” or “total cost”.

Physical and psychological pain

In English, we have a category “pain” which we subdivide into the “physical” and the “psychological”. But this taxonomy is misleading.

Consider the experiences of eating some intensely distasteful food—once as a kid I added chocolate chips to my tomato soup and it was awful—or of smelling a really nasty odor. These sensations are not pains. But, phenomenologically, the difference between these unpleasantness experiences and the physical pains does not seem greater than the difference between some of the psychological pains and the physical pains.

Reflection on the phenomenology does not, I think, reveal any good reason to classify physical pains and psychological pains in one natural category and the experiences of nasty taste or smell in another.

Nor does there seem to be any good reason to classify this way when one thinks of what the representational content of the experiences is. Physical pains seem to represent our body as damaged. Psychological pains seem to represent complex external states of affairs as bad, particularly in relation to ourselves. And bad taste seems to represent a food as bad for us. There is a common core in all these cases, and there does not seem to be a tighter common core to the physical and psychological pains taken as a unit.

Thus it seems to me that having a category of pain that includes physical and psychological pains but excludes the other unpleasant experiences I mentioned is like having a biological category of bovinoequines that comprises cows and horses but excludes donkeys. It’s just not a natural taxonomy, and unnatural taxonomies can mislead one in reflection.

I propose that the natural category here is the unpleasant, under which fall most physical pains, most psychological pains and a large host of other experiences. But there seem to be such things as pleasant or at least not unpleasant pains.)

One can have suffering without pain—I suffered when I had the soup with cholocate chips, but it didn’t hurt (except my pride in my culinary ideas). One can have pain without suffering. So the tie between pain and suffering is not very tight. But perhaps there is a tighter connection between suffering and the unpleasant. I now have two options that are worth exploring, both quite simple:

• suffering is unpleasantness

• suffering is significant unpleasantness.

We can talk of physical pains and psychological pains, but we need to be careful not to be misled by the repetition of the word “pain” into thinking there is a natural category that includes just these two subcategories of pains but excludes the others.

How do we divide up the unpleasant? One way is to base things on the representational content. Maybe all of the unpleasant represents a state of affairs as bad, but we can subdivide the bads. Here are some potentially natural subdivisions of bads:

• to self vs. not to self (more precisely: qua to self vs. not qua to self)

• non-instrumental vs. instrumental

• intrinsic vs. relational

• actual vs. potential

• past vs. present vs. future

• bodily vs. mental.

We get something a little bit like the English category of “pain” if we consider unpleasantness that represents non-instrumental intrinsic actual present bad to self. But not quite: many psychological pains are backward looking, and some are complex experiences that include components of representing bads to others.

Hope vs. despair

A well-known problem, noticed by Meirav, is that it is difficult to distinguish hope from despair. Both the hoper and the despairer are unsure about an outcome and they both have a positive attitude towards it. So what's the difference? Meirav has a story involving a special factor, but I want to try something else.

If I predict an outcome, and the outcome happens, there is the pleasure of correct prediction. When I despair and predict a negative outcome, that pleasure takes the distinctive more intense "I told you so" form of vindicated despair. And if the good outcome happens, despite my despair, then I should be glad about the outcome, but there is a perverse kind of sadness at the frustration of the despair.

The opposite happens when I hope. When the better outcome happens, then even though I may not have predicted the better outcome, and hence I may not have the pleasure of correct prediction, I do have the pleasure of hope's vindication. And when the bad outcome happens, I forego the small comfort of the vindication of despair.

The pleasures of correct prediction and the pains of incorrect prediction are doxastic in nature: they are pleasures and pains of right and wrong opinion. But hope and despair can, of course, exist without prediction. But when I hope for a good outcome, then I dispose myself for pleasures and pains of this doxastic sort much as if I were predicting the good outcome. When I despair of the good outcome, then I dispose myself for these pleasures and pains much as if I were predicting the bad outcome.

We can think of hoping and despairing as moves in a game. If you hope for p, then you win if and only if p is true. If you despair of p, then you win if and only if p is false. In this game of hoping and despairing, you are respectively banking on the good and the bad outcomes.

But this banking is restricted. It is in general false that when I hope for a good outcome, I act as if it were to come true. I can hope for the best while preparing for the worst. But nonetheless, by hoping I align myself with the best.

This gives us an interesting emotional utility story about hope and despair. When I hope for a good outcome, I stack a second good outcome--a victory in the hope and despair game, and the pleasure of that victory--on top of the hoped-for good outcome, and I stack a second bad outcome--a sad loss in the game--on top of the hoped-against bad outcome. And when I despair of the good outcome, I moderate my goods and bads: when the bad outcome happens, the badness is moderated by the joy of victory in the game, but when the good outcome happens, the goodness is tempered by the pain of loss. Despair, thus, functions very much like an insurance policy, spreading some utility from worlds where things go well into worlds where things go badly.

If the four goods and bads that the hope/despair game super-adds (goods: vindicated hope and vindicated despair; bads: frustrated hope and needless despair) are equal in magnitude, and if we have additive expected utilities with expected utility maximization, then as far this super-addition goes, you are better off hoping when the probability of the good outcome is greater than 1/2 and are better off despairing when the probability of the bad outcome is is less than 1/2. And I suspect (without doing the calculations) that realistic risk-averseness will shift the rationality cut-off higher up, so that with credences slightly above 1/2, despair will still be reasonable. Hope, on the other hand, intensifies risks: the person who hoped whose hope was in vain is worse off than the person who despaired and was right. A particularly risk-averse person, by the above considerations, may have reason to despair even when the probability is fairly high. These considerations might give us a nice evolutionary explanation of why we developed the mechanisms of hope and despair as part of our emotional repertoire.

However, these considerations are crude. For there can be something qualitatively bad about despair: it makes one not be as single-minded. It aligns one's will with the bad outcome in such a way that one rejoices in it, and one is saddened by the good outcome. To engage in despair on the above utility grounds is like taking out life-insurance on someone one loves in order to be comforted should the person die, rather than for the normal reasons of fiscal prudence.

This suggests a reason why the New Testament calls Christians to hope. Hope in Christ is part and parcel of a single-minded betting of everything on Christ, rather than the hedging of despair or holding back from wagering in neither hoping nor despairing. We should not take out insurance policies against Christianity's truth. But when the hope is vindicated, the fact that we hoped will intensify the joy.

I am making no claim that the above is all there is to hope and despair.

Pain and unpleasantness

I just realized something that probably was obvious to many people: the opposite of the pleasant isn’t the painful, but the unpleasant. Great physical effort can be painful, but it could also just be effortful and unpleasant (though there can also be a pleasure mixed with the unpleasantness). An even clearer case is distasteful food, which is unpleasant but not painful to eat.

While it would sound wimpy to talk about “the problem of the unpleasant” in place of “the problem of pain”, pain isn’t in general worse than the non-painfully unpleasant. For instance, there are distasteful foods to which I would prefer the pain of a flu shot.

It may be that among physically unpleasant events, pains monopolize the top of the unpleasantness hierarchy (test case: extreme bitterness—maybe that’s actually painful?). So while some instances of non-painful physical unpleasantness are worse than some instances of painful physical unpleasantness, some instances of physical pain are worse than any non-painful physical unpleasantness. Because of this, we worry about “the problem of pain” rather than “the problem of unpleasantness”, and we talk of grievous emotions as psychological pain rather than psychological unpleasantness. Talk of “unpleasantness” implicates we are talking about something that isn’t severe.

Even further complicating matters, it seems plausible that there are instances of physical pain that aren’t actually unpleasant. Mild soreness after exercise—that feeling of muscles well-used but not abused—might be in that category. This may even be true of some cases of psychological pain. Someone close to you has died, and you’re too numb to feel grief. Then suddenly the grief floods in, tears flow. It’s painful, but it need not be unpleasant—unlike the numbness, which was definitely unpleasant. It might even be pleasant, the pleasure of emotions functioning properly.

I know that the standard way of analyzing cases like that of exercise soreness or a flood of tears is that there is an unpleasant core but it’s outbalanced by associated pleasures. But I think that may be mistaken. The pain is there, but I am not sure that there need be any unpleasantness. What we have is something that would have been unpleasant in isolation, but in conjunction with the rest of the context we get a complex feeling that is not unpleasant. This unpleasantness is perhaps something like the red, blue and green subpixels in the white areas of your screen—the subpixels each contribute to the color (if the blue weren’t there, the area would look yellow rather than white), and in isolation they would produce their respective colors, but in the context their color is lost. Likewise, it may be better phenomenology to say that in cases like these the pain would be unpleasant in isolation, but in the context its unpleasantness is lost.

If this is right, then philosophers really should be talking about the problem of unpleasantness rather than the problem of pain, simply being careful to cancel the implicature that the unpleasantness isn’t severe.

Looping and eternal pleasure

Scenario 1: You experience a day of deeply meaningful bliss and then are annihilated.

Scenario 2: You experience a day of deeply meaningful bliss and then travel back in time, with memories reset, to restart that very same day of an internally looping life.

Scenario 3: You experience a day of deeply meaningful bliss, over and over infinitely many times, with memories reset.

Here are some initial intuitions I have:

1. Scenario 3 is much better than Scenario 1.

2. Scenario 3 is at most a little better than Scenario 2.

But the following can be argued for:

3. Scenario 2 is no better than Scenario 1.

After all, you experience exactly the same period of bliss in Scenarios 1 and 2. Granted, in Scenario 1 you are annihilated, but (a) that doesn’t hurt, and (b) the only harm from the annihilation is that your existence is limited to a single day, which is also the case in Scenario 2. Time travel is admittedly cool, but because of the memory reset in Scenario 2, you don’t get the satisfaction of knowing you’re a time-traveler.

This is a paradox. How to get out of it? I see two options:

4. Deny the possibility of internal time loops.

5. Affirm that Scenario 3 is much better than Scenario 2.

Regarding 4, one would also have to deny the possibility of external time loops. After all, it wouldn’t be significantly all that different for you if everybody’s time looped together in the same way, and so external time loops can be used to construct a variant on Scenario 2.

I personally like both 4 and 5.

Objection: On psychological theories of personal identity, memory reset is death and hence in Scenario 3 you only live one day.

Response 1: Psychological theories of personal identity are false.

Response 2: Modify Scenario 3. Before that day of bliss, you have a completely neutral day. On each of the days of deeply meaningful bliss, you remember that neutral day, but then have amnesia with respect to the last 24-hour period once each blissful day ends. By psychological theories, there is identity between the person on each blissful day and the neutral day, and hence by symmetry and transitivity of identity, there is identity between the person over all the blissful days.

Note: Scenario 1 is inspired by a question by user “Red”.

Eternal pleasure

Suppose the minute of the greatest earthly pleasure you’ve ever tasted was repeated, over and over, for eternity, with your memory reset before each repeat. If hedonism were true, this would be a truly wonderful life, much better than your actual life. But it seems to be a pretty rotten life. So hedonism seems quite far from the truth.

But could there, perhaps, be a pleasure such that eternal repetition of it, in and of itself, would be worth having? It would have to be a pleasure that carries its meaningfulness in itself, one whose quale itself is deeply meaningful. It would have to have be an experience of infinite depth. Could we have such an experience? With Aquinas, I think philosophy cannot answer this question, though theology can.

Pleasure and pain are discrete

Alice, Bob and Chuck each come into existence at 1 o'clock.

• Alice lives for one hour. She feels continuous and unchanging morally innocent pleasure during that hour with no pain.
• Bob lives for two hours. During the first hour his experiences are exactly like Alice's; during the second hour, these experiences re-run.
• Chuck has the same internal stream of subjective experiences as Bob, but is accelerated by a factor of two relative to external time, so he lives only for one hour.

Now, let's add some axioms about hedonic value:

1. If x and y have the same internal stream of subjective experiences, though perhaps at different external rates, their lives are hedonically equally.
2. If x and y live during the same period of external time, and at each moment experience the same pleasure or pain, their lives are hedonically equal.
3. If x and y live hedonically equal lives, and y and z live hedonically equal lives, then x and z live hedonically equal lives (hedonic equality is transitive).
4. The same pleasant experience lived twice is hedonically better than when lived once.

Note that (4) needs to be carefully understood. Of course, a longer stint of a pleasant experience can get boring. But if one experiences boredom, that's not the same experience then.

Now, we have a contradiction. For by (1), Chuck and Bob's lives are hedonically equal. But by (2), Alice's and Chuck's lives are hedonically equal. Here's why. Take any time t between 1 and 2 o'clock, i.e., any time during the lives of Alice and Chuck. Because the pleasure is constant during that hour-long period, Alice's pleasure at t is the same as her pleasure at (say) 1:30. And for the same reason, Chuck's pleasure at t is the same as his pleasure at (say) 1:15. But Chuck's state at 1:15 is the same as Bob's state at 1:30, since Chuck lives the same life that Bob does, but twice as fast. And Bob's state at 1:30 is the same as Alice's state at 1:30. So, Chuck's pleasure at t is equal to Alice's pleasure at t, and hence by (2) Alice's and Chuck's lives are hedonically equal. Hence, by transitivity, Alice's and Bob's lives are hedonically equal. And this contradicts (4).

Assuming our hedonic axioms (1)-(4) are correct, the story about Alice, Bob and Chuck leads to a contradiction. So what's wrong with the story? I think it's the assumption that it's possible for pleasure to be continuous. Instead, I submit, temporally extended pleasure has to be discrete, made up of a finite number of pieces of pleasure. These pieces might be instantaneous or temporally undivided but extended. And of course the argument can be run with pain in place of pleasure as well.

Prostitution and sex only for pleasure

Suppose Sid is the beneficiary of a trust fund which yields just enough money to live, but not to have much pleasure in life. Sid works as a prostitute solely in order to get more money in order to buy pleasures like fine dining. Thus, Sid has sex for the sake of pleasure. Compare this to Flynn who has sex solely for the sake of pleasure in the more ordinary way--it's the sex that he enjoys. Is there any interesting moral difference between Sid and Flynn? Both Sid and Flynn are having sex solely for the sake of pleasure: they are both ultimately being paid with pleasure. (The intermediate presence of money in the case of Sid may be a red herring. We might suppose Sid is having sex with a great chef and he doesn't enjoy the sex, but she is going to give him great culinary pleasures in exchange.)

I think a case can be made that Sid and Flynn are close to morally on par. (And clearly Sid is morally in a less good position than the more typical prostitute who has sex to provide for the necessities of life.) This would suggest that:

• If sex solely for money is always wrong, then sex solely for pleasure is always wrong.

When I think of ways of challenging the above argument, I think about how there is something interpersonally significant about the pleasure of sex, and so I think that maybe there is something less perverse about Flynn's case than Sid's. But on the other hand, I've described Flynn as just pursuing the pleasure, not any interpersonal significance of the pleasure.

The value of the pleasure in sex

When loving parents make decisions concerning their teenage children, they put very small, if any, weight on the physical pleasure of sex as isolated from other things. For instance, that some course of action is likely to increase the number of times that the child experiences the physical pleasure of sex counts very little in favor of the course of action—it may even count against it. Parents are either mistaken in this weighting or not.

We would expect parents to be more reliable in weighing the values of pleasures of activities that they themselves find pleasurable. But typical adults do find sex pleasurable, and presumably that includes the parents (and may even help explain why they are parents). Indeed, typical adults find sex physically as pleasant as teenagers do, or more so due to greater experience. Moreover, I think we would expect parents if anything to be better judges of the values of outcomes in the case of their children than in their own case, at least when the outcomes are ones that the parents are familiar with and find pleasant or unpleasant in much the way that the children do. One is likely to be more clearheaded when one is making decisions for someone else.

But if this is right, then parents are probably right when they put very low weight on the physical pleasure of sex in the case of their children. Thus, probably, the physical pleasure of sex has very low value in the case of children, at least in itself. But since this physical pleasure is basically the same in adults (perhaps somewhat greater due to experience, but likely not an order of magnitude greater, at least in males), it follows that the physical pleasure of sex in and of itself, isolated from other considerations, has very low value in general. (Of course, the pleasure as combined with other goods may have significant value.)

Sex solely for pleasure

Is there an intrinsic morally significant difference between having sex solely for one's pleasure and having sex solely for money? To sharpen the question, let's ask: Is there a morally significant difference between having sex solely for one's pleasure and having sex for money which one intends to use solely as a means to one's pleasure?

Both are cases where the sex is engaged in solely for hedonistic ends, but in the one case the pleasure is achieved more indirectly. Still, in both cases there is some indirectness. Sex, in and of itself, need not be pleasurable. In both cases, it seems to be engaged in as a mere means to pleasure. The difference, however, is that in the one case, the pleasure is the pleasure of this very sexual act, while in the other case, the pleasure is a different pleasure (e.g., the pleasure of driving a nice car, or the pleasure of sex with someone else whom one wishes to seduce in an expensive way). So, in the case of sex solely for one's pleasure, the pleasure is more closely tied to the sex, and it may even be a mistake to talk of the pleasure as a distinct end. If so, then there is a significant—and perhaps morally so—difference between the two cases: in the money case, sex is engaged in purely instrumentally, while in the pleasure-of-sex case, the end is too close to the sex to call the sex purely instrumental.

This distinction, however, imports into the original question something that wasn't there. Granted, there is a difference between sex solely for the pleasure of the sex, and sex for the sake of money which one wants for the sake of some other pleasure. But in the case I originally specified, I did not suppose a case of sex for the sake of the pleasure of the sex; I supposed a case of sex for the sake of pleasure simpliciter. And when one's end is pleasure simpliciter, then one's action plan involves a fungibility of means: one looks around for the ways to get a lot of pleasure, considering whether it is more convenient to get pleasure by proving a new theorem, or having sex, or eating cake, or volunteering at a shelter—or by having sex for money and then using the money to buy a pleasure. Insofar as one is having sex solely for the sake of pleasure, one is prima facie indifferent between these options except insofar as they produce different levels of pleasure with different degrees of convenience.

And if so, then it does not seem that there is a significant moral difference between sex solely for money solely for pleasure and sex directly solely for pleasure. In particular, it follows that if we think that non-marital sex for money is always wrong, we will conclude that non-marital sex solely for pleasure is always wrong; and if we think that marital sex for money is always wrong, we will likewise conclude that marital sex solely for pleasure is always wrong. (To be honest, I think some cases of marital sex for money—say, when one is starving and one's spouse refuses to provide food except on condition of sex—are more defensible than marital sex solely for pleasure.)

However, there is a difference between sex for the pleasure of the sex and sex for money. Sex for the pleasure of the sex is not solely hedonistic. The hedonist as such does not care what she is taking pleasure in, convenience, consequences and intensity being kept constant. Insofar as one cares about what one is taking pleasure in, one is not a pure hedonist. In a case of sex for the pleasure of the sex, the sex is not present purely instrumentally. Here, we also should distinguish sex for the pleasure of sex from sex for the pleasure of the sex. The pleasure of sex can be achieved apart from sex, say by direct neural input. The pleasure of the sex can only be achieved through the sex. It may be that there is little moral difference between sex for the sake of the pleasure of sex and sex for the sake of money. After all, one could have sex for the sake of money in order to get the pleasure of sex—perhaps one is saving up for a neural sexual pleasure implant. But there is a moral difference between sex for the sake of the pleasure of the sex and sex for the sake of money. Say that a sophisticated hedonist is someone for whom not only the intensity, convenience and consequences of a pleasure matters, but the kind of pleasure also matters. Maybe the sophisticated hedonist wants to have a variety of kinds of pleasure, or maybe she has arbitrarily chosen some pleasures over others. In any case, the person who has sex for the sake of the pleasure of the sex is neither a pure hedonist nor a sophisticated hedonist, for she not only cares for the kind of pleasure, but also that which it is had in.

One is unlikely—perhaps it is even an impossibility—to value the pleasure of the sex without non-instrumentally valuing the sex. There may well be people who have sex solely for pleasure. For instance, if Sally wants to have some pleasure and goes through all the options and chooses the one with the best balance of intensity and convenience, and that happens to be sex, she may be having sex solely for pleasure. But such cases are, I think, rare. The pure case of someone who wants to have sex for the sake of the pleasure of sex is less rare. Such a case would require the person to be indifferent as to the gender, age, appearance and species of the sexual partner, except insofar as this impacts convenience, consequences and the pleasure received. Maybe some people do have such an indifference—the only reason, for instance, why they prefer their partners to be of their own species is that they find bestiality to lack something of pleasure.

There is a further kind of distinction we should draw at this point, a distinction between having sex for the sake of the pleasure of the sex—of this particular sexual act with this person at this time—and having sex for the sake of the pleasure of this sort of sex. Thus, the person who cares about the appearance of their sexual partner (typically) seeks the pleasure of sex with a good-looking person. The number of people who have sex for the sake of pleasure is probably small, the number of people who have sex for the sake of the pleasure of sex is probably also small, but the number of people who have sex for the sake of the pleasure of sex of a certain sort (where the sort is either specified by specifying the kind of sexual act or the kind of partner or both) is probably larger. And this, too, I think is not very different morally from sex for money. After all, one might well be having sex for money for the sake of the pleasure of sex of the preferred sort. And I think this is morally objectionable, and apt to make an object of the partner.

On the other hand, sex for the sake of the pleasure of the sex requires or at least tends to require valuing the sex with this person at this time non-instrumentally (actions are individuated by agent, time, patient, etc.) And that's different.

The Christian tradition has unanimously condemned sex for the sake of one's own pleasure. But it is not clear that this condemnation of hedonistic sex applies in the case of sex for the sake of the pleasure of the sex—for in that case, the intended end, "the pleasure of the sex", is partly constituted by the sex itself, and hence the sex is engaged in for the sake of the pleasant good of the sex, rather than for the sake of pleasure alone. And if the sex is intrinsically unitive, this may well be sex for the sake of pleasant union, which is a species of sex for the sake of union, which in turn is taken to be permissible by the tradition. Of course, this is very speculative, and the tradition is authoritative while my interpretation of it is not.

Pleasure and same-sex sexual activity

1. Each kind of deeply humanly significant pleasure is a way of affectively relating to an independent deeply humanly significant kind of good in which the pleasure is taken. (Premise)
2. There is no deeply humanly significant good in same-sex sexual activity when the couple takes no pleasure in the activity. (Premise)
3. Climactic sexual pleasure is deeply humanly significant. (Premise)
4. Climactic sexual pleasure is a pleasure taken in sexual activity. (Premise)
5. If a kind P of pleasure is a way of affectively relating to an independent kind G of good, and an instance of P fails in this way to relate to an existent instance of G, then that instance is empty. (Definition)
6. It is wrong to deliberately induce an instance of a deeply humanly significant kind of pleasure when that instance is empty. (Premise)
7. If there would be no deeply humanly significant good in an activity were the activity done pleasurelessly, then the activity fails to realize an instance of an independently deeply humanly significant kind of good. (Premise)
8. Therefore, same-sex sexual activity fails to realize an instance of an independently deeply humanly significant kind of good. (By 2 and 7)
9. Therefore, taking climactic sexual pleasure in sexual activity is empty when the partners are of the same sex. (By 1, 5 and 8)
10. Therefore, climactic sexual pleasure between partners of the same sex is empty. (By 4 and 9)
11. It is wrong to deliberately induce climactic sexual pleasure between partners of the same sex. (By 3, 6 and 10)

If this argument is sound, then heterosexual sexual relations intended to induce climactic sexual pleasure are wrong when they fail to realize a deeply humanly significant independent good. What could be that independent good? Well, if it's a deliberate attempt at reproduction, then sex is wrong whenever a couple isn't trying to reproduce. But I think the the pleasure in sex is not affectively associated with a voluntary and deliberate attempt to reproduce—there is too much of the animal in the pleasure. Likewise, the couple is not simply taking pleasure in their loving relationship—they are taking pleasure in sex. (If they were taking pleasure in their loving relationship, the sexual nature of the pleasure would be unexplained, since one can have just as deeply loving non-sexual relationships, or at best explained circularly.) Rather, it is that, I think, there is a completing of a biological whole in uncontracepted heterosexual intercourse, and that is deeply humanly significant. If this completing of a biological whole is what is deeply humanly significant about heterosexual sex, then oral sex, masturbation, and the like are ruled out. Contraception may not be immediately ruled out, but is still wrong since it is contrary to integrity: the couple is acting against the biological union which constitutes the deeply humanly significant good in which the climactic pleasure is being taken.

A false principle concerning desire

I am not the first to discover this particular fallacy—in fact, part of this post is based on ideas I got in conversion from somebody who got them from something he read. But the ideas are no less fun for being mainly not mine.

Consider the following argument for psychological hedonism, the doctrine that the only thing we pursue is pleasure:

1. Whenever we pursue something other than pleasure, we pursue it because it gives us pleasure. (Premise)
2. Therefore, what we really pursue is the pleasure it affords to us.

Not only is (1) false, but (2) does not follow from it. The following inference is invalid:

3. We pursue x because it gives us y.
4. Therefore, what we really pursue is y.

In fact, taken literally, (4) contradicts (3), since if "what we really pursue" is y, and y is not x, then we are not pursuing x (to pursue is the same as to really pursue). But even if we weaken (4) to:

5. Therefore, we pursue y

the inference is still invalid. If I am trying to find a woman who offers water to my camels (cf. Genesis 24), it does not follow that what I am really pursuing is water for my camels. Perhaps I just want the kind of woman who gives water to my camels. Likewise, one might want a particular fig tree in the garden because it yields figs, not because one wants the figs, but because yielding figs is largely constitutive of the health of a tree, and one wants only healthy trees in the garden.

Perhaps the inference works better if we replace (1) by:

6. Whenever we pursue something other than pleasure, we pursue it only because it gives us pleasure.

It's easier to see how (2) might be thought to follow, but (6) now begs the question against the non-hedonist. In any case, the inference is still logically invalid.

In fact, it is even incorrect to conclude from the claim that I seek x solely because it yields y that I want y at all. Suppose that, whimsically, I desire a magical hat that yields rabbits. I only want the hat because it yields rabbits—my whim is that I want to have rabbits pop into existence out of a hat. I can want such a hat for such a reason without having any desire for the rabbits. The rabbits themselves are a nuisance, and I would have no interest at all in rabbits that come into existence in any way other than out of a hat.

It might be objected that then I don't want the hat just because it yields rabbits, but I want the hat because it is a hat that yields rabbits, and so this isn't a counterexample to the inference type. But if so, then the non-hedonist need only say that she doesn't want x just because it yields pleasure, but she wants an x because it is an x that yields pleasure.

The fallacy here also occurs in the Lysis in the argument that if I am friends with x because x yields y, then what I am really friends with is y.

The fun proper to science

I was with the kids at a large and obviously well-funded science museum today (I am not talking of the excellent Mayborn Museum in Waco), a place of much noise, flashing lights, and so on, all designed, presumably, to make science fun to kids. It was great fun for the kids. But it didn't make science fun for the kids. The kids had fun while doing things that might have had value for a scientific education had the excitement of noise, flashing lights and too many other kids not been distracting them. Or, as one might somewhat unfairly put it, they had fun doing things that would have had a value for a scientific education had the fun not distracted them from it.

There are two little points here, one for science education and one for both science education and for philosophy. First, to do something flashy—pressing a button and getting a result—is only science if it is done in the appropriate context of theory and/or careful observation. To learn to enjoy doing something flashy like that is not at all to learn to enjoy science. There is no correlation between doing flashy things and doing science. Some scientific experiments are flashy, involving booms and sparks, and some involve noting how varying x correlates with a weak but statistically significant variation starting with the third decimal place of y in a sufficiently large population.

Second, even if what the kids did were science, to have fun while doing science is not the same as to have fun doing science. One can have fun while doing science by listening to enjoyable music on one's iPod while doing an experiment, but that is not having fun doing science. For the doing of science to be fun to one, the fun must come from the doing of science, and must do so, as Aristotle would say, non-accidentally. It must be the fun proper to science, and must come from science in the right way. The fun of getting flashy effects is not one of the main forms of fun proper to science. The fun proper to science is the fun of observing patterns emerging from careful observations, of making and/or testing bold hypotheses, of seeing the mystery of the ordinary, and generally the excitement of the intellectual life.

Now, granted, one can often make a child (or even an adult) come to experience the fun of an activity A by having her engage in A while enjoying B. Thus, I guess, to enjoy certain kinds of music, one needs to hear a lot of it, and hear it in a positive mood. So one might feed someone chocolates while they listen to that music, both to make her stick around and to create a pleasant association. So making kids have fun while they're doing science, even if the fun they have is not proper to the science, is in principle a viable strategy. But that requires that the kids be actually doing science while having fun, and that one be aware of the distinction between having fun doing science and having fun while doing science, so that one does not congratulate oneself on "having made science fun" when one has merely had the kids have fun while having science.

Part of the point here parallels Peter Geach's point about the good. One cannot simply define "good" and "baseball player", and then conjoin the definitions to get the definition of "good basketball player" (if one could, the inference from "x is a good basketball player" and "x is a baseball player" to "x is a good baseball player" would be valid). The same is true of "fun" and "science". An activity isn't an instance of "fun science" just because it is fun and science.