 Man, I get a deliciously indulgent pleasure from watching these calligraphy videos. The sumptuous spread of the ink, the slow motions of the pen, talk about epic curlicues. If you've paid any attention to previous episodes, you probably know that I'm a fan of Star Trek, specifically the TNG flavor. I love the bright, shiny, optimistic vision of humanity moving beyond our peddier squabbles out into the wider universe. The future primarily dominated by values of scientific inquiry, exploration, and eliminating suffering and want. Of course, it can be difficult to write a TV series about a post-scarcity society, in a future where technological advances mean that humans don't really need anything anymore. Where's the conflict? Where's the drama? Will Picard get his tea? This leaves an interesting question. What would Star Trek look like without the militaristic backdrop of Starfleet? What if the crew of the Enterprise wasn't subject to a chain of command or orders from higher-ups, but were all just kind of traveling around the galaxy together, doing their own thing? Also, what if the ship's computer was a near-unipotent superintelligence with an attitude? E&M Bank's culture novels paint just such a picture of an alternate vision of space-faring, techno-utopian future. Rather than a united crew of duty-bound officers serving in a rigid military hierarchy, the stories focus on ordinary people living very cosmopolitan lives in an anarchic, post-scarcity intergalactic society of radical freedom, more or less run by extraordinarily powerful superintelligent AIs, with awesomely silly names. The eponymous culture is many things, democratic, meddling, diverse, but philosophically it's decidedly hedonistic. That term has some negative connotations in normal usage, denoting some sort of disgusting, immoral, overindulgence, and carnal desires. Many members of the culture love to party and indulge in baser instincts, but in philosophy hedonism merely describes a set of beliefs granting some privileged consideration for the phenomena of pleasure and pain. Pleasure can be derived from numerous sources, including less salacious ones than sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The Epicurean School, one of the earliest historical records of hedonistic philosophy, taught that the greatest pleasure in life was derived from simple living and modest appetites, as intense desire was simply another source of pain. You probably wouldn't find an Epicurean hedonist doing body shots at Coachella, the pleasure of giving back to a community or pushing yourself to succeed, the pain of seeing your kids suffer or of not living up to your potential. Most philosophers would agree that all of these things count for the purposes of hedonism, and that there's nothing inherently special about more salacious pleasures we normally associate with the word. Many value systems, which spurn earthly pleasures, have little nuggets of hedonism at their core, like the promise of eternal bliss in the afterlife, or a guarantee of freedom from suffering. There are several related principles that are lumped under the general heading of hedonism. For example, psychological hedonism is the position that everything that we do is ultimately to feel good or to avoid feeling bad. Now, if you dragged yourself out of bed early this morning to go to work, rather than sleeping for another half hour or so, you might have plausible grounds to doubt that position. But psychological hedonists usually make an important distinction between basic and non-basic motives. Basic motives drive us to action without any detours through thoughts about likely causal results, being desirable ends in and of themselves, while non-basic motives require a chain of reasoning and prediction to prompt someone to act in a certain way. You don't get out of bed in the morning just because you want to. You do it in the service of some other end goal, which a psychological hedonist would argue is a chain that always ends in either gaining pleasure or avoiding pain. I want to get out of bed because I want to shower before I go to work, because I want to be at work on time because if I'm not at work on time, I'll get fired, and if I get fired, it will feel really bad. Psychological hedonism seems to fit in nicely with our current understanding of neuroscience and behavior. The molecular systems that drive animals and humans to act in certain ways are called reward pathways for a reason. When you get a shot of dopamine for doing something that you've been conditioned to do, whether by evolution or nice researchers who tell you that you're doing a good job, it feels nice. It's certainly not unreasonable to say that those feelings are ultimately why we choose to do anything. Despite its explanatory power, there are decent grounds to be uncomfortable about jumping onto the psychological hedonist train. A common objection to all hedonistic claims, which we'll encounter later, is one of specificity in the definition of pleasure. Although it's compelling to suggest that human behavior is all motivated by some broad interpretation of the words pleasure and pain, it's difficult to draw boundaries around what those words mean without reducing the statement to a tautology or making it blatantly untrue. Maybe it's a stretch to call it pleasure-seeking behavior when someone volunteers to be tortured in the place of a loved one, even if they feel some amount of relief in doing so. Also, although it agrees broadly with some of our scientific knowledge about psychology and behavior, it's difficult to say that it's justified by those findings. We certainly haven't mapped out all the nuances of human motivation and trying to pick apart the supposed basic and non-basic motives seems like a thing that would be difficult to do robustly in experiments. In short, it's an easy claim to make and it agrees with some of our observations, but it's hard to prove in a way that would convince anyone who doesn't already believe it. Next, let's take a look at value and prudential hedonism. Value hedonists assert that the only metric for intrinsic worth is whether something causes pleasure or pain, that the beginning and end of an object or action's value is whether it makes someone feel good or bad. Similar to basic and non-basic motives, value hedonists differentiate between instrumental and intrinsic importance. Prudential hedonists have similar beliefs, but take them one step further, suggesting that hedonism is prudent, that is, that it's the best way for someone to lead a good life. The most well-known framework of value hedonism is utilitarianism, which we've discussed before in the context of consequentialist ethics, often associated with philosopher Jeremy Bentham and his student John Stuart Mill. Utilitarianism holds that the only thing that matters for morality is maximizing total pleasure and minimizing total pain. Any other perceived sources of moral goodness, stuff like justice, rights, equality, and so on, are only instrumentally worthwhile. Worthwhile only insofar as they facilitate those fuzzy feel-goods. Bentham and Mill agreed that maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain were the only things that really mattered, but the difficulty of nailing down what that really means caused some disagreement. Bentham was a quantitative hedonist, holding that the only thing of consequence was the total amount of pleasure produced, regardless of its source. However, Mill was dubious of this assertion, agreeing with critics who characterized it as the happiness of a mollusk. After all, if a philosopher's pleasure of grappling with heady problems was just as valuable as the simpler and more accessible pleasure of, say, eating cheesecake, what was the motivation to spend time learning how to do philosophy instead of eating cheesecake? He was more moved by a form of qualitative hedonism, asserting that there were certain pleasures that were of higher quality than others, and that the total value of a phenomenon could only be judged by both the quality and quantity of pleasure it produced. He proposed that relative quality could be judged by asking those who had experienced two options which they'd prefer to do. It's not like a baby can offer any insight as to the relative pleasures produced by philosophy or cheesecake, but if you ask some philosophers, you might get a better idea. This gives us some helpful grounds for preferring a few high-quality pleasures, even at the expense of numerous lower-quality ones, but you might understandably object to Mill's handling of the cheesecake problem. There does seem to be an element of bait-and-switch to it, as though he's rolling some new set of evaluative criteria under the heading of pleasure and hoping that we'll let it slide. Is this new quality thing really about pleasure alone, or might it be about things like beauty, commitment, authenticity, any number of things? There are other serious difficulties that value hedonism must contend with to be an acceptable rubric for worth. In general, if it can be demonstrated that two situations have this same hedonic value, but one of them is intuitively preferable to the other, we have a strong indication that there's something else that we're recognizing as being valuable besides pleasure and pain, which would disprove the hedonistic thesis. One such argument raised by philosopher Robert Nozick involves a matrix-like simulation engine, a VR machine that's totally indistinguishable from reality. In this machine, you can have any experience you like. You can win a triathlon. You can solve the P equals NP problem. You can fall in love or eat cheesecake. By definition, the hedonic content of both the real and virtual versions of these experiences is identical. You feel just as satisfied or elated in each scenario as you would if they had actually happened. But they didn't. Not really. Are they just as valuable? Is it better to feel like you've done these things or to have actually done them? There are also empirical grounds to doubt the claims of prudential hedonism, most notably the infamous paradox of hedonism. Although it's well and good to claim that happiness is the thing that makes life worth living, people who pursue it directly often find less success than those who dedicate themselves to other goals. That doesn't necessarily invalidate the prudential hedonist position, but it might be a decent cause for some skepticism. The problems with the various claims of hedonism, both definitional and practical, have dissuaded many contemporary philosophers from accepting it as a sufficient explanation for human motivation and value. But it does have some intuitively compelling corollaries for improving the human condition, and maybe some clues as to what we should strive for in the future. For myself, I'm not totally sure if pleasure and pain are the only things that really matter, or if they're the only reason we ever do anything. All I know is that I really want to read some more culture books, and it sure feels good to read them. Is seeking pleasure the end all of human motivation? Is it the only thing that has any intrinsic value? Please leave a comment below, and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. 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