[Der_Einzige]

Maybe I'm the ultimate hedonist, but this seems not-dystopian to me.

I wrote an essay back in high school for some english class with exactly the same sentiment when I had to read brave new world. I'd fking love to be either engineered (brave new world) or have an ML algorithm learn how to generate the perfect stimuli for me. If they can do this while avoiding all of the negative effects of normal drugs (and again, brave new world does this with Soma) - I'd be the first to do them.

I think most critiques of hedonism are basically more refined versions of "you should hate nature!". Seeing how John Stewart Mill regarded folks who describe themselves as hedonists made me realize that western Philosophy has a whole project to keep people from enjoying themselves:

"It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they know only their own side of the question.”

Apparently, I am irrational if I choose to give up knowledge or freedom for pleasure. It shocks me about how universal this sentiment is within western philosophy, and how few actually critique it.

[pmoriarty]

I'm not sure what prompted you to pin this view on Western philosophy in particular, as plenty of other cultures and philosophies value asceticism.

Also, it's not like hedonism doesn't have downsides, such as the common effect of needing ever more extreme stimulation to achieve the pleasure you could once achieve with less extreme stimulation, leading to a spiral of debauchery which often has deleterious consequences to the hedonist, even if you overlook the pain and suffering they often have to cause others to please themselves.

There's a reason that so many philosophers throughout history and from different cultures have advocated moderation, but the hedonist has trouble moderating themselves because then they have to do things that aren't pleasurable.

There are also advantages to asceticism, from the (debatable but potentially valid) spiritual benefits, to achieving self-mastery and control, not getting too attached to pleasure or comfort when it could be easily taken away from you, etc...

In any case, the case for hedonism is far from a slam dunk, and you'd really have to do a lot more work to make that case convincingly. Just saying that "Western Philosophy" is against it is not very convincing.

[lukebuehler]

The idea was (and is) that there are higher pleasures of the intellect and lower pleasures of the senses. The ancient philosophers generally argued that we should eschew the latter for the former, that sacrificing sensual pleasures for the life of the mind was ushering us into a the most permanent and stable form of enjoyment.

See Plato’s Philebus, and Aristotle NE VII, and many other treatments on this distinction.

I’m not saying your point is not valid, but I would not say that Western philosophy rejected pleasures as a whole, but that it was quite critical of optimizing one’s life for the pleasures of the senses.

[ok_coo]

I'm wary of humanity's hedonic adaptation.

It seems to me that we would be in an eternal loop of these algos trying to optimize for our pleasure, succeeding for a time until that's just not enough, and then it's on to the next thing they create until we become abominations.

You can see this type of behavior already in the excesses the ultra wealthy exhibit.

I think it's good for humanity that we don't just live lives of pleasure.