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Are "good emotional states" simply a matter of a specific configuration of chemicals in the brain, or do they arise from material facts? I would argue the latter. We don't actually have a way to engineer full, holistic "good emotional states" in people outside of helping them create an actual good life. When we imagine various ways to reduce this to an engineering/tech problem, we tend to recoil in horror from the idea, seeing it as deeply inhuman.
It seems to me that "good emotional states" are best thought of as an indicator light, not the thing to be measured.
But it appears to me that an actual good life consists in the acquisition of great, powerful, significant, noteworthy emotional states. A life where you enter a forest and don’t feel awe, or look at a partner and don’t feel love, is miserable. What’s the point of hiking a mountain if you feel nothing during and after? That’s exactly depression, considered the worst state. The crucial ingredient is surely the emotional consequent. So if we say “a good life consists of material events”, I think we’re forgetting that every good material event is considered such because of its downstream emotional effect. That’s not to deny that nearly every emotional state arises from physical experiences and events. That’s certainly true.
As an example, I would rather be a poor beggar who can feel “positive” emotional states, than the richest man in the world who only has dulled emotions. To bring history into the discussion, this is a huge point in Abrahamic and Buddhist thought. And consider this illuminating example: in religious history you’ve had some monks experience religious ecstasy. This is considered a very desirable and euphoric state, and sometimes results in the person developing a life of holiness and prosociality. But the simple existence of such a state, I think, proves the value of emotionality and that it doesn’t necessary depend entirely on material conditions or physical events.
The Nozickian pleasure machine thought experiment is probably the best disproof of my ideas, but I think this is complicated by some things. There’s a residue of distrust when we think about man-made contraptions that colors our intuition on “perfect hedonism” simulation machines. There’s also the knowledge of the simulation that negatively colors our intuition, and an “under-determined” valuation of the natural world that humans rationally hold (we are created by nature and nature is likely superior to everything we can make). So our intuition on the “pleasure machine” is colored by our implicit distrust of the man-made and our inability to imagine ourselves in a perfect hedonic state, plus our intellectual knowledge that we’d “lose touch” with real living loved ones. So I’m unsure if we can actually trust our intuition on this example. Imagine instead, if an omnipotent God told us that He would lift us and our loved ones to a paradisal plane. I think a lot more people would be willing to do this, because (1) we intuit that Gods are natural/trustful/“the real deal”, (2) we bring our loved ones. So I’m not sure if the machine debunks my idea that emotionality is central: we feel negative emotion at the thought of getting into the machine for a couple of reasons, and it’s arguably impossible for a human to imagine his entire being put into perfect experiential enjoyment.
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