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snav's avatar

This is really great and resonates with my experience of music. I've described it as sometimes being intense and psychedelic, like waves of intensity flowing through my entire body, and sometimes I get sad about not being able to share that experience with anyone, but it's meaningful on its own anyway.

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Tanmay's avatar

Your post reminds me J.S. Mill's arguments for qualitative differences in pleasure in "Utilitarianism." I'm skeptical of the argument in your post for similar reasons that I am skeptical that Mill's argument really works.

Mill says that Good A is "qualitatively better" than Good B if all or almost all individuals who are experienced with both goods would choose Good A over any quantity of Good B, independent of any feeling of obligation towards either choice. (He is arguing against Bentham, who claimed that all goods are comparable (and can be reduced to pleasure), famously saying "if the quantity of pleasure be the same, pushpin [children's game] is as good as poetry.")

For example, Mill argues no human would give up their life for that of the most pampered pig. Hence, “enjoyment of human cognitive faculties” is qualitatively superior to “pig pleasures.” He says that if the pig disagrees, this owes only to its ignorance of the alternative.

Mill recognizes that people regularly choose lower pleasures over higher ones (a problem for his view). However, Mill argues that all such instances occur out of akrasia, and those who choose lower pleasures over higher never do so willingly. (He compares a love for the arts to a tender plant that can easily die, but which no one would willingly let perish.)

I think this defense doesn't work. First, though humans may not prefer to be pigs, it is a non-sequitur to conclude that pig existence is therefore less “pleasurable.” Mill must argue further that humans could not prefer something that does not maximize pleasure.

Worse, even well-educated individuals who have experienced the joys of intellectual pursuits and liberty regularly reject them in favor of hedonistic or materialistic pleasures. If Mill intends to dismiss these widespread choices as unwillingly made, and thus irrelevant in the calculus of qualitative pleasure determination, Mill must answer in what sense they are “unwilling” (evidently they are not *coerced*). I do not think he can provide a good reply; yet, without an independent explanation of which choices are made willingly, Mill is simply inconsistently applying his criterion of recourse to human preference for determining qualitative difference in pleasure.

Along these lines I'm skeptical that it really makes sense to say that people who appreciate great art (say, reading Hamlet) are really experiencing greater pleasure than people watching WWE.

The most mundane reply seems to me to be to say that people are value pluralists, and value more than just pleasure. Drinking or playing video games might be more pleasurable than reading Hamlet, but I'll read Hamlet anyway because I think it reveals profound truths about human life, and (as a very weak statement) I prefer spending some time learning deep truths about human life over spending all of my time on pleasure.

A more interesting line that I'm open to is that reading Hamlet can be a transformative experience, a la LA Paul (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_Experience). That is, it is hard to imagine before reading Hamlet really what it will be like, and it is hard to reason about the decision because it is likely to change your values. There are elements of this idea in your CS Lewis quote.

I think that reading Hamlet is a lot like having children. Adults with minor children in the house report lower moment to moment happiness, and plausibly less "pleasure" than nonparents. However, parents report that they believe their lives are better along dimensions other than moment-to-moment happiness (e.g. more meaning / purpose), which supports my argument that people are value pluralists. Furthermore, having children drastically changes your values (both from interviews and MRIs, which show that having kids changes fathers' brains), and is a classic example of a "transformative experience."

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