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Re: someone who prioritizes living in the moment, would this person choose to lose his memory entirely in exchange for greater one-time experiences? I think we can determine that even such a person greatly values his collection of subjective experiences (memories). A complete discounting of memory would entail an almost suicidal drive toward a single great experience with no concern for the future, because future is a prediction based on memory. We’re back to a hypothetical: is the person who is dancing naked in the rain right now eternally better lived than the person who danced in the rain 100 times in the past? The idea behind favoring the latter person is that we value the enjoyments of memory. Vivid present subjective experiences are savored by memory, which is why people collect and remember them, and would not choose to eliminate their memory if they could. (At least in my experience, everyone I know who is adventurous treasures their memories).
Re: someone who loves righteous anger, should we trust his own knowledge of what is greatest to experience? For instance, there are alcoholics is who truly believe a good life consists of getting drunk. Should we say they are right or wrong? To me, someone who loves to only experience righteous anger sounds inhuman — I would rather say they don’t actually know what is greatest for their own enjoyment.
If we want to take this to extremes I think the extreme end of having a memory but lacking present experience would also be bad. Imagine someone who can experience no joy, no passion, no pleasure contemporaneous with their experience but only by remembering it later. Does that person have an ideal life? It seems to me like it would be quite bad! Being unable to enjoy the pleasure of sex, while having it. Or the beauty of a painting or piece of music while experiencing it. Only having vivid memories of these things and not emotionally fulfilling contemporaneous experiences seems quite un-ideal.
Taking this route seems like it requires the ideal life consisting in something other than the subjective evaluation of the individual living the life. In which case, in what does it consist? What makes you right about enjoying righteous anger being an un-ideal way to live? Why isn't it you who are wrong and they who are right?
Memory and experience are not mutually exclusive. To have a great memory of an ideal experience, you need to experience the present sharply.
Do you think a reasonable person would choose to live a life filled with anger? Do such people report high life satisfaction? Do we have records of people giving up not for more anger, or do we have the opposite? Do major world religions prioritize anger over other emotions? No reasonable person would decide to prioritize only anger in his life, and we know this because no reasonable person has ever done so.
The criticism denies that there can be any improvement in mood or life satisfaction. But reasonable people decide all the time to focus on improving their mood and life satisfaction, and they don’t pick “maximum anger”.
I agree but this seems in tension with your OP. In that post you posit a tradeoff between memory and quality of experience and come down on the side of memory. If your argument instead is that people with a good memory must, by necessity, have a high quality experience as well that seems quite different than the description in the OP. If this is the case, why isn't it that people with a certain quality of experience must also have a certain quality of memory?
What do you mean by "reasonable?" Why do only the evaluations of "reasonable" people matter?
I have no idea. Should I take this question as indicating that if they did report high life satisfaction, you would agree they were living an ideal life? Is an ideal life, then, whatever causes one to self-report high life satisfaction?
I don't know why either of these are relevant. The fact that some people change from being filled with righteous anger to being some other way or that world religions don't counsel living this way don't seem relevant to evaluating the question of whether someone could live this way and be satisfied with their life.
Citation?
I don't understand how my criticism denies there can be improvement. My point is that whether someone's life is "ideal" is based on the evaluation of the individual who is living the life in question. As you note, people evaluate their own lives as un-ideal all the time! I don't understand how my criticism is incompatible with this fact.
If you had a son, and your son was fine with living a life as a Minecraft server admin, would you (or any other person in the world who you believe is a reasonable judge) be fine with this life decision as well? What about your friend? What if he claimed he was fine living a life that centered around huffing paint? Wouldn’t we intervene on this friend’s life choice, because we believe a sane person wouldn’t center life on insignificance and huffing paint? Similarly, if our friend was yelling at a wall all day every day, and when we asked him about this he says “I am experiencing heightened righteous anger”, we would call a doctor to come and interfere in his life choice.
What I’m saying boils down to: our actions in the real world prove that we trust the assessments of reasonable people on matters of mood , not in every case but in cases. And we believe in clear things that are bad (regarding emotional states). The class of people who we agree are reasonable on matters of life decisions (the “reasonable person” which our entire justice system revolves around) will overwhelmingly believe: living is good, an alcoholic life is bad, certain emotional states are desirable. Is this not so? If it’s so, then we can’t trust an unreasonable person’s assessment on their life quality.
The problem is that the last two sentences of the first paragraph of your OP are in tension with each other. You write:
The first sentence is about the subjective evaluation of the person living the life on their own life. Specifically, that they would not trade that life for any other person's life. The second sentence is about the hypothetical evaluation of a reasonable person, that a reasonable person would want that life.
I think there are many examples of lives that are one or the other of these, but not both. Lots of people probably want to be rich or be celebrities or whatever and those same celebrities wish their lives were other than they are. Lots of people probably would not trade their lives for a different life, but the hypothetical reasonable person evaluating their life from the outside would not want it.
What I'm looking for is some clarity in what it means to be "ideal." Is it the subjective evaluation of the person living the life? Is it the judgment of the hypothetical reasonable observer?
Your comment here seems to be assuming the "ideal" life (or, at least, the "un-ideal" life) is the result of the inter-subjective agreement of "reasonable" people. I do not think that is a very good criterion. Not least because that inter-subjective agreement can and has changed. Once upon a time "reasonable" people would have regarded "being gay" in a similar way as your examples of huffing paint or being a Minecraft server admin. Even today in some countries or cultural contexts they still would. Is it impossible, then, to live an ideal life while being gay? Was it the case that it is impossible to live an ideal life as a gay person in a community where reasonable people regard being gay as unideal, but it's possible to live an ideal life as a gay person in a community where they don't regard being gay as unideal?
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