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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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Is it a good life if you dedicate your life to video games?

Depends on how good the game is. A posthuman game might well be more complex, dynamic and interesting than our lives.

The most popular games today like fortnite or LoL are closer to the skinner-box, dopamine VR-headset future. They have to be cheap to run so they're not going to be that fantastic.

Whether it's competition, entertainment of others or enjoyment I see greater complexity and resources as an unalloyed good in terms of video-game value. At minimum it should be better than 'sit in an office and do various manipulations of text.'

That's an interesting, because it is very alien to my intuitions. Is a pleasure more morally worthy if it is more subtle or complex, or takes more intellectual capacity to appreciate? That doesn't seem obvious, to me. That would imply that, for instance, a young child's pleasure at a bowl of ice cream for dessert is among the unworthiest of all pleasures. Or that my pleasure at a fresh breeze on a beautiful day is particularly contemptible. It seems to be that the complexity or subtlety of a pleasure does not reliably correlate with its moral worthiness. There are some very simple, even child-like pleasures that strike me as paradigmatically worthy (a beautiful sunset, a tasty meal, a smile from someone you love), and some very complex pleasures that strike me as worthy (contemplating advanced mathematics, stellar physics), and some that I struggle to rank (meditating on the nature of God, say). Likewise, however, I can think of very simple pleasures that seem obviously unworthy (wireheading is the classic example), as well as complex pleasures that seem unworthy (anything you've ever been tempted to call intellectual masturbation).

When I judge particular pleasures or joys as worthy or unworthy, my intuitions do not seem to clearly correlate with its complexity, or the intelligence required to enjoy it. It seems like other criteria are involved.

More important than that, though, is the question of, regardless of the quality of the pleasure sought, whether pleasure-seeking by itself is sufficient to make a life morally good. Enjoying pleasures is definitionally going to be more pleasant than doing boring office-work, but the defence of office-work would presumably be in terms of its flow-on effects. Office-work, assuming it's a real job and not just make-work, is aimed at in some way serving others or producing something for others - self-gratification is not the goal, as it is with entertainment. Does that make a difference? We might also ask about character formation. Filling in expenses reports may not be as fun as playing your favourite game, but it may have different impacts on one's character.

Ultimately my position is not that pleasure is inherently unworthy or bad to experience, or that humans should not enjoy pleasurable activities, but it is that a life dedicated wholly to seeking pleasures is morally empty and contemptible. It even strikes me as something unlikely to successfully produce great pleasures, in many cases; I tend more to the school of thought that says that pleasures come alongside or as the byproducts of other endeavours, which must be sought for their own sake. I wouldn't want to follow that principle off a cliff - I don't think there's anything wrong with, say, going to see a film because you want to enjoy yourself - but in terms of the overall direction of a person's life, I think it is helpful.

Well eating ice cream all day gets boring fast.

Eating ice cream as a self-reward after achieving something is better, now we're adding more complexity to the experience as a whole which is broadened beyond just ice cream. Songs are good but songs played at the right time in the film are better. The smile from someone you love is another example, it's more than just a smile because of that added background and context.

Likewise with video games. There's some value in Pong but the simplicity really limits it. You're doing the same thing again and again. If you were doing more and different things at a greater level of depth, without skinner box mechanics to trick the brain into coming back...

but it is that a life dedicated wholly to seeking pleasures is morally empty and contemptible

Wouldn't it be worse for an incompetent to be sticking his nose into a well-running machine earnestly trying to help yet only ever causing more problems? That activates my sense of aversion and cringe. In a world of strong and benign superintelligences, there will probably be nothing that a once-human can do to produce any kind of wealth or benefit. The astrophysics-specialist bots will do all the pondering of the stars at a massively superhuman level, the poetry bots will make poems better than any human or machine could, the engineer-bots will do all the engineering. They were purpose designed to be the absolute best at those things. One could imagine a loverengineer-bot too that spins up a perfect partner specifically for you. If you want a challenge and excitement, there's challenges, reverses, drama...

Having one's heritage be an ape generalist is probably a structural deficiency when it comes to 'ability to do things'.

Our idle pleasure seeker in a post-singularitarian reality would still be a great mind and capable of great feats by our standards but there'd be nothing to contribute. I just don't see how this can be a bad ending if everything you want is on tap, including all the best human experiences and post-human experiences that are even better.

I'd tend to think that any pleasure endlessly reiterated would become contemptible. There is something disconcerting or even pathetic about obsessive repetition. That's part of why we find the Skinner box so repulsive.

I would agree that it would be bad for a person to be incompetently trying to interfere with work done by a superior, though for me I don't find the superintelligence hypothetical particularly illuminating. The world is already full of examples of competent and incompetent people. It would be absurd for me to try to insert myself into, say, the cockpit of an aeroplane - I know nothing about piloting and the attempt would only embarrass me.

What would constitute a good life in a world where there is genuinely nothing that needs to be accomplished? I'm not particularly sure. I do not expect such a world to ever occur in this life - sorry, I'm pessimistic about artificial superintelligences - so for me that question seems most relevant as a question about heaven, and there I'm happy to admit to ignorance. Right now I'm not so much pushing for any particular answer as just saying that endless self-pleasure seems insufficient, as an answer, to me.