Are wireheads happy?

Interesting article, but these really bugged me:

1) Using the environment as an example of false revealed preference. One person's pollution never ruins "the environment", at least not "their environment". The environment is only ruined by the aggregate effects of many people's pollution; or, the person is massively polluting a different environment.

Environmental solutions require collective agreement and enforcement, not unilateral disarmament. So polluting while claiming to value the environment is not hypocrisy even in the conventional sense of the term (that you criticize here).

And this is at least the second time I've explained this to you. Please stop using it as an example.

2) This phrasing:

There are enough connections between them that there's a big correlation in their activity, but the correlation isn't one ...

That initially reads like you're saying "the correlation isn't a correlation" so I had to re-read it. I recommend using any of the following terms as a replacement for the bolded word: perfect, unity, 1.0, 1, or "equal to one", any of which would have been clearer.

(Btw, I agree with your disrecommendation of Landsburg!)

I've seen a fair amount of happiness research, and happiness tends towards the "liking" end of the scale. What makes people happy is giving to charity, meditating, long walks, and so on; what makes people unhappy is commuting, work stress, and child-rearing. Religion, old age, and living in Utah also make people happy.

A life designed to maximize happiness, according to happiness researchers, would not be a hedonistic orgy, as one might imagine. You are actually happier with a fair degree of self-restraint. But it would have a lot more peaceful hobbies and fewer grand, stressful goals (like strenuous careers and parenthood.) To me, the happiness-optimized life does not sound fun. It is not something I would look forward to with anticipation and eagerness. Statistically speaking, we'd like such a life, but we wouldn't want it. Myself, I'd rather be given what I want than what would make me happy.

Thus wanting (motivation) is near, liking (enjoyment) is far (dopamine is near, opioids are far!). If liking doesn't have the power to make you actually do things, its role is primarily in forming your beliefs about what you want, which leads to presenting good images of yourself to others with sincerity.

So far, this is not a disagreement with "revealed preferences" thought. The disagreement would come in value judgment, where instead of taking the side of wanting (as economists seem to), or the side of liking (naive view, or one of the many varieties of moral ideologies), one carefully considers the virtues on case-to-case basis, being open to discard parts from either category. True preference is neither revealed nor felt.

By definition, if you choose X over Y, then X is a higher utility option than Y. That means utility represents wanting and not liking. But good utilitarians (and, presumably, artificial intelligences) try to maximize utility. This correlates contingently with maximizing happiness, but not necessarily

You are equivocating on the term 'utility' here, as have so many other commenters before in this forum. In the first sentence above, 'utility' is used in the sense given to that term by axiomatic utility theory. When the preferences of an individual conform to a set of axioms, they can be represented by a 'utility function'. The 'utilities' of this individual are the values of that function. By contrast, when ethicists discuss utilitarianism, what they mean by 'utility' is either pleasure or good. The empirical studies you cite, therefore, do not pose problems for utility theory or utilitarianism. They only pose problems for the muddled view on which utility functions represent that which hedonistic utilitarians think we ought to maximize.

Great post. It raised a question for me: why did evolution give us the pleasure mechanism at all, if the urge mechanism is sufficient to make us do stuff?

I noticed the distinction between wanting and liking as a result of my meditation practice. I began to derive great pleasure from very simple things, like the quality of an intake of breath, or the color combination of trees and sky.

And, I began to notice a significant decrease in compulsive wanting, such as for excess food, and for any amount of alcohol.

I also noticed a significant decrease in my startle reflex.

Similar results have been reported from Davidson's lab at the University of Wisconsin. http://psyphz.psych.wisc.edu/

Perhaps it is true that our modest technology for altering brain states (simple wireheading, recreational drugs, magnetic stimulation, etc.) leads only to stimulation of the "wanting" centers of the brain and to simple (though at times intense) pleasurable sensations. On the other hand though, it seems almost inevitable that as the secrets of the brain are progressively unlocked, and as our ability to manipulate the brain grows, it will be possible to generate all sorts of brain states, including those "higher" ones associated with love, accomplishment, fulfillment, joy, religious experiences, insight, bliss, tranquility and so on. Hence, while your analysis appears to be quite relevant with regard to wireheading today, I am skeptical that it is likely to apply much to the brain technology that could exist 50 years from now.

The first category, "things you do even though you don't like them very much" sounds like many drug addictions.

It's not limited to drugs or even similar physical stimuli like tasty food; according to my personal experience you can get the same effect with computer games. There's games that can be plenty of fun in the beginning (while you're learning what works), but stop being so once you abstract from that to a simple set of rules by which you can (usually) win, but nevertheless stay quite addictive in the latter phase. Whenever I play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup for more than a few hours, I inevitably end up at a point where I don't even need to verbally think about what I'm doing for 95%+ of the wall-clock time spent playing, but that doesn't make it much easier to quit.

Popular vocabulary suggests that this is a fairly common effect.

Man this post is horrifying to me. It seems to imply (or at least suggest) a world where everyone, individually and collectively, is in the grip of mind controlling parasites, shifting people's choices and redirecting societies resources, against our best interests. We're all trapped in these mental snares where we can't even choose something different.

I've never really taken akrasia, per se, seriously, because I basically believed the claim about revealed preferences. If you're engaging in some behavior that's because some part of you wants (and (implicitly) likes) the resulting consequences.

This new view is dystopic.

I will need to go back through this again, but as a DD person, I know that my ability to motivate myself to learn new things was astronomical compared to after I destroyed most of the dopaminergic systems in my head with Drug Abuse.

The largest area I have noticed is in painting and sculpting. Two areas where I used to spend inordinate amounts of time practicing/doing. I used to have the vast majority of my work-spaces covered with miniatures and sculptures that I was working on. Now... I have a hard time getting motivated to just get them out (which is I think most of the problem).

I do know that it is possible for me to mechanically activate the motivation to perform these tasks (and I am on medication that is supposed to help, but I get the feeling it isn't), just like the rats were lacking motivation to eat when their "wanting" circuits were knocked out.

Thanks for the article. I will need to dig through some posts on another forum where I recently posted a link to a paper about modifying the brains of people with obsessive-compulsions (Drug Addicts mostly) who were able to knock out the wanting to do drugs part of their brain... I'll post the title and a link as soon as I can find the name of it. It talks about some of the same things (I think it is a U of Mich. study as well)

A University of Michigan study analyzed the brains of rats eating a favorite food. They found separate circuits for "wanting" and "liking", and were able to knock out either circuit without affecting the other (it was actually kind of cute - they measured the number of times the rats licked their lips as a proxy for "liking", though of course they had a highly technical rationale behind it).

One could come up with a story about how people are motivated to act selfishly but enjoy acting morally, which allows them to tell others a story about how virtuous they are while still pursuing their own selfish gain.

Rats! The neuroscientists were studying rats. It is troubling how easy it is to come up with these signalling stories to explain whatever observations we encounter.

What explanation can be suggested for a different mechanism for enjoying a food than the one for motivation to get food that doesn't rely on impressing our little rat friends with our culinary sophistication?

The other problem here is distinguishing pleasure, fun, and happiness.

As I understand wireheading, it's equivalent to experiencing a lengthy orgasm. I would describe an orgasm as pleasurable, but it seems inaccurate to call it "fun", or to call the state of experiencing an orgasm as "happiness".

For the record, the actual Landsburg quote is

In one recent survey, 39 percent of New Yorkers said they would leave the city "if they could"! Every one of them was in New York on the day of the interview, so we know that at a minimum, 39 percent of New Yorkers lie to pollsters.

page 63 of his latest book The Big Questions.

Although I'm generally a big fan of Landsburg, this seems much more a case of confusion over what "leave the city" and "if you can" mean than one of lying.

On a related note, it seems people do not use 'happy' and 'unhappy' as opposite, at least when they're referring to a whole life. Rather, happiness involves normative notions (a good life) whereas being unhappy is simply about endorphins.

http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/experimental_philosophy/2009/12/can-.html

There is a very simple explanation to the seeming discrepancy between wanting and liking, and that is that a person is always experiencing a tension between wanting a bit of pleasure now, versus a lot of pleasure later. Yes, spending time with your family may give you some pleasure now, but staying in NY and putting money aside will give you a lot of security later on. This may not explain the whole difference but perhaps a good chunk of it.

I think wireheading is dismissed far too quickly here and elsewhere. Like it or not (pun intended), the only reason we do things is to obtain a sensation out of them, and if we can obtain the sensation without going through the motions I see no objective reason why we should, other than "we've always done it that way".

I think we have to seriously consider the possibility that wireheading may be the right thing to do. It seems to trivialize the entire human subjective experience to reduce wireheading to "a needle in the brain". That may be the crude state in which it is now. However it should be uncontroversial that with mastery over physics and matter the only events worthy of notice will be mental events (as in a Dyson sphere for instance). Then, engineering will all be about producing internal worlds, not outcomes on the outside - a very, very complex, multidimensional type of wireheading. Which gives us the sum total of the value that the universe can produce, without the mess.

The difference between being stuck in orgasm mode, and having an infinity of worlds and experiences to explore, is simply in whether we value variety more than intensity or vice versa. Hopefully the AI will know what's best for us :D

(Response to old post)

According to a recent poll, two out of three New Yorkers say that, given the choice, they would rather live somewhere else. But all of them have the choice, and none of them live anywhere else. A proper summary of the results of this poll would be: two out of three New Yorkers lie on polls.

Ordinary people do not interpret the statement "given the choice" to mean "under at least one circumstance where it is not physically impossible". That's not an example of revealed preferences or inconsistency--it's an example of real people not acting like Internet geeks.

I was reading a free on line book "The Authoritarians" by Robert Altemeyer one of his many findings of studying fundamentalists authoritarian follower types is that many deal with the guilt of doing some thing morally wrong by asking God for forgiveness and then feel closer to "Much less guilty" then "Appreciably less guilty" it may not be a wire in the head but it should keep one from some suffering.

I also very much like Dan Gilbert's Ted talk on synthesizing happiness I use it all the time because "it really is not so bad" and "it turned out for the best"

Great post! I completely agree with the criticism of revealed preferences in economics.

As a hedonistic utilitarian, I can't quite understand why we would favor anything other than the "liking" response. Converting the universe to utilitronium producing real pleasure is my preferred outcome. (And fortunately, there's enough of a connection between my "wanting" and "liking" systems that I want this to happen!)

The big point I took away from this article is that wanting and liking are different, and thus we should be skeptical of "revealed preferences".

But the title seemed to imply that the article wanted to address the question of whether or not we should wirehead. The last paragraph seems to argue that we should be really careful with wireheading, because we could get it wrong and not really know that we got it wrong.

Go too far toward the liking direction, and you risk something different from wireheading only in that the probe is stuck in a different part of the brain. Go too far in the wanting direction, and you risk people getting lots of shiny stuff they thought they wanted but don't actually enjoy. So which form of good should altruists, governments, FAIs, and other agencies in the helping people business respect?

I agree with this, but given that it's a central argument of the article, I think it could use a longer explanation.

I'm a neuroscience major and have known about the different circuits for liking vs. wanting. And it's always been a belief of mine that people's revealed preferences are often times just wrong, and that this is huge problem with our economy. But somehow I never connected this to the liking/wanting circuits being different. Thanks!

they measured the number of times the rats licked their lips as a proxy for "liking", though of course they had a highly technical rationale behind it

Could you give a quick summary of this rationale?

I don't smoke, but I made the mistake of starting a can of Pringles yesterday. If you >asked me my favorite food, there are dozens of things I would say before "Pringles". >Right now, and for the vast majority of my life, I feel no desire to go and get Pringles. >But once I've had that first chip, my motivation for a second chip goes through the >roof, without my subjective assessment of how tasty Pringles are changing one bit.

What is missing from this is the effort (which eats up the limited willpower budget) required to get the second Pringle chip. Your motivation for a second Pringle chip would be much lower if you only brought one bag of Pringle chips, and all bags contained one chip. However, your motivation to have another classof(Pringle) = potato chip no doubt rises -- due to the fact that chips are on your thoughts rather than iPhones.

Talking about effort allows us to bring in habits into the discussion, which you might define as sets of actions that, due to their frequent use, are much less effort to perform.

The difference between enjoyment and motivation provides an argument that could >rescue these people. It may be that a person really does enjoy spending time with >their family more than they enjoy their iPhone, but they're more motivated to work >and buy iPhones than they are to spend time with their family.

Alternatively, for potentially good reasons before (working hard to buy a house for said family), work has become habitual while spending time with the family has not. Hence, work is the default set of actions, the default no-effort state, and anything that takes time off work requires effort. Spending time with the family could do this, yet buying an iPhone with the tons of money this person has would not.

A way of summarizing the effect of effort is that it is a function of a particular persons set of no-effort (no willpower) actions. This function defines how much 'wanting' is required to do that action -- less effort actions of the same amount of 'wanting' are more 'desirable' to be done.

Willpower plays a big role in this in that you can spend willpower to pull yourself out of the default state (a default state such as being in New York), but it only last so long.

It's hard to track down specific things from that wireheading.com site, but this seems to be a good overview. Of particular note are a couple of excerpts:

The results of these experiments indicate that reinforcing brain stimulation may have two distinct effects: (a) it activates pathways related to natural drives, and (b) it stimulates reinforcement pathways normally activated by natural rewards. The empirical observations seem to contradict classic "drive-reduction" theories of reinforcement (reinforcement appears to be associated with increased drive in the EBS paradigm). However, it is not difficult to construct a plausible alternate hypothesis: Animals may self-stimulate because the stimulation provides the experience of an intense drive that is instantly reduced due to the concurrent activation of related reward neurons. This interpretation accounts neatly for many of the apparent paradoxes we have already encountered. Priming is necessary, according to this interpretation, because EBS reinforcement not only activates reward pathways but also provides the reason why that should be pleasurable (Deutsch, 1976). (This also accounts for rapid extinction, as well as the decreased efficacy of intermittent reinforcement.) The hypothesis assumes that the reinforcing properties of EBS are determined by the degree of activation of related motivational systems. It therefore accounts readily for the observed interactions between the reinforcing properties of a stimulus and various experimental conditions that affect related primary drives such as hunger. When there is little endogenous activity, for instance immediately after a meal, the stimulation elicits only a small amount of drive-related activity. Concurrent activation of related reward circuits therefore can produce only a small reinforcement effect. When hunger-related neural pathways are already active because of deprivation, the same stimulation elicits more drive and hence more reinforcement. Indeed, it may arouse the drive system sufficiently to elicit consumatory behavior that further potentiates the reinforcing effects of the electrical stimulation.

...

It is interesting to note that while the animal literature suggests that brain stimulation has positive, reinforcing effects, the human literature indicates that relief of anxiety, depression and other unpleasant affective conditions may be the most common "reward" of electrical brain stimulation in humans. Patients with electrodes in the septum, thalamus, and periventricular gray of the midbrain often express euphoria because the stimulation seems to reduce existing negative affective reactions (even intractable pain appears to loose its affective impact). However, many psychiatrists caution that this may not reflect an activation of a basic reward mechanism (Delgado, 1976; Heath et al., 1968). Relief from chronic anxiety has been reported during and even long after stimulation of frontal cortex. Again, the experiential response appears to be relief rather than reward per se (Crow&Cooper, 1972).

In general, it seems as though electrical brain stimulation isn't quite as effective at producing bliss as one might wish (or fear).

So which form of good should altruists, governments, FAIs, and other agencies in the helping people business respect?

Somehow, trying to figure out the policy an FAI or paternalist government should have by examining our addictive reactions strikes me as like doing transportation planning by looking at people's reactions to red, yellow, and green lights. Not that people's reactions to these things are irrelevant to traffic planning, but rather that figuring out where people are trying to go is even more important than figuring out their reactions to traffic signals.

The post talks about signals in the brain that motivate us powerfully. Almost certainly, evolution favored these signalling mechanisms because of where it tended to take us rather than how it tended to direct us there.

Maybe an FAI rather than figuring how to make us feel like we are satisfied or happy would instead figure out how to evoke these responses when we were doing something good for us and how to get negative responses when we were doing something bad for us. Maybe an FAI would rather re-wire us rather than wirehead us.

How do we stop our CEV from bringing us all beyond human, and should we even want to?

My grandma always assumes that if I don't want to have [some kind of food] right now, that means I don't like it.

Problem: large chunks of philosophy and economics are based upon wanting and liking being the same thing.

I don't think that is true.

"Wanting" maps onto expected utility; "liking" is the reward signal - the actual utility.

That framing surely makes it seem like pretty standard economics.

There are some minor footnotes about how the reward signal can sometimes be self-generated - e.g. when you know you should have got the reward, but were just unlucky.

as a person who plans to wirehead themselves if other positive futures don't work out I find this very interesting but unconvincing.

“The wanting system is activated by dopamine, and the liking system is activated by opioids. There are enough connections between them that there's a big correlation in their activity” But are they orthogonal in principle?

I now think that people are way more misaligned with themselves than I had thought.

This summarizes a common strain of thought in economics, the idea of "revealed preferences". People tend to say they like a lot of things, like family or the environment or a friendly workplace. Many of the same people who say these things then go and ignore their families, pollute, and take high-paying but stressful jobs. The traditional economic explanation is that the people's actions reveal their true preferences, and that all the talk about caring about family and the environment is just stuff people say to look good and gain status.

I think you are mischaracterizing the concept of revealed preference. It's not that they claim to care about family or the environment "just for status", but rather, they exaggerate how much they care about one thing relative to another. For example, when I was overweight, I used to say stuff like "I want to be skinny". But I'd keep eating junk food anyway. The reality was that I wanted to eat junk food more than I wanted to be healthy. (Maybe not long-term: hyperbolic discounting can explain this, since people over-weight rewards that come sooner, so even people who will pick an apple instead of a cookie for tomorrow's lunch might be tempted enough to eat the cookie when the choice is right in front of them.) Nowadays, I enjoy being healthy more than I enjoy the taste of ice cream, so I can convince myself to stop eating it if I think about the downsides.

To me, the question of whether wireheading is good is one where wireheading is defined as stimulating actual liking (not wanting). Because to me, the question is trying to get at whether or not happiness is reducible in theory, not in practice.

And so, I sense that this shouldn't be titled "Are wireheads happy?". It's more about the distinction between wanting and liking.

"One could come up with a story about how people are motivated to act selfishly but enjoy acting morally..."

Actually, I think a lot of stories are like that.

Because "CONFLICT IS DRAMA!!!!!1!!!one!!!!", a whole lot of stories I've been reading involve the characters having an arc that goes like this:

-Problem occurs, everyone has different ideas about how to solve it. -Ignored dissenting character, perhaps with prodding by certain outside forces, blows up, acts like a jerk, and storms off. -Dissenting character realizes that regardless of how much better their own plan was, that they've let a lot of relatively small and meaningless things drive a wedge between themselves and their friends, right when their friends needed them to be there and "Oh I was a fool!" and blah blah blah kiss and make up, Friendship is Magic.

Unless its a zombie apocolypse story, in which case the character in question NEVER stop fighting until they die, or at least they stop and reveal "they were a good person all along who made bad decisions" about ten mintues or so before the zombies eat them.

For research on human happiness that really does a great job of presenting non-intuitive results in a compelling fashion, I recommend Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness.

For a great book in a lot of ways, I recommend Robert Frank's "Darwin Economy." I read this because in his interview on Russ Robert's "Econtalk" podcast, Robert Frank made the claim that 100 years from now Darwin will be recognized as the greatest economist.

Some of their points relevant to wireheading: happiness seems mostly relative, relative to where you were recently. In engineering/physics terms, I think of it as there is no DC term, if you attach to something pleasure producing (whether wirehead, or just plain head) it is delicious, and delicious for a while, but even if you don't stay attached long enough to have it just be OK, its deliciousness declines back towards the middle.

I wonder. I grew up with experience in multiple systems of meditation, and found a way that works for me. Without electrodes or drugs or Nobel Prizes, I can choose to feel happy and relaxed and whatever. When I think about it, meditation can feel more pleasing and satisfying than every other experience in my life. Yet (luckily?) I do not feel any compulsion to do that in place of many other things, or try to advocate it. This is not because of willpower. While it lasts I like and want it, as if there's fulfillment of purpose, and when it's over I cannot recall that feeling faithfully enough to desire it more than I desire chocolate. Also, I cannot very reliably reproduce the feeling - it occurs only some of the time I try, cannot be had too frequently(no idea why) and cannot be consciously prolonged. So I consider it a positive addition to my life, especially helpful in yanking me out of episodes of gloom.

This of course raises multiple questions. There's such thing as ambient mood as opposed to current momentary pleasure, and if a person is pissed off too often to concentrate productively, would improving the mood be the right choice, especially if it has an upper bound and doesn't lead to the person madly pressing the button indefinitely? Hell, if there's any way to make people happier with no other change, without causing crippling obsession - maybe there's such a quirk in the brain (with want and pleasure detached from each other) to be exploited safely with meditation, maybe the button is in responsible hands, would it be acceptable? Though, the meditation sometimes make me wonder if the mind can directly change the world (I changed my emotional reality, and it felt real). Is impaired rationality an acceptable price then?

So which form of good should altruists, governments, FAIs, and other agencies in the helping people business respect?

Governments should give people what people say they want, rather than giving people what the governments think will make people happier, whenever they can't do both. But this is not because it's intrinsically better for people to get what they want than to get what makes them happier (it isn't), it's because people will resent what they percieve as paternalism in governments and because they won't pay taxes and obey laws in general if they resent their governments. Without taxes and law-abiding citizens, there will not be much happiness in the long run. So, simply for the sake of happiness maximizing, governments should (except, possibly, in some very, very extreme situations) just do what people want.

It's understandable that people want others to respect what they want, rather than wanting others to try to make them happier: even if we are not all experts ourselves on what will make us happier (not all people know about happiness research), we may need to make our own mistakes in order to really come to trust that what people say works works and that what people say doesn't work doesn't work. Also, some of government's alleged benevolent paternalism "for people's own good" (for example Orwellian surveillance in the name of the "war on terror") may even be part of a plan to enslave or otherwise exploit the people. We may know these things subconsciously, and that may explain why some of us are so reluctant to conclude that what we want has no intrinsic value and that pleasure is the only thing that has intrinsical value. The instrumental value of letting people have what they want (rather than paternalistically giving them what some government thinks they need) is so huge, that saying it has "mere" instrumental value feels like neglecting how huge a value it has. However, it doesn't really have intrinsic value, it just feels that way, because we are not accostumed to thinking that something that has only instrumental value can have such a huge instrumental value.

For example, freedom of speech is of huge importance, but not primarily because people want it, but primarily because it provides happiness and prevents too much suffering from happening. If it were the case that freedom of speech didn't provide any happiness and didn't prevent any suffering, but people still eagerly wanted it, there would be no point in letting anybody have freedom of speech. However, this would imply either that being denied freedom of speech in no way caused any form of suffering in people, or that, if it caused suffering, then getting freedom of speech wouldn't relieve any of that suffering. That is a hypothetical scenario so hard to imagine that I think the fact that it is so hard to imagine is the reason why people have difficulties accepting the truth that freedom of speech has merely instrumental value.

I certainly find that I like creative work but don't want to work, like music but don't want to listen to music, like exercise but (sometimes) don't want to exercise. I like volunteering, but don't want to volunteer. (Perhaps tautologically) I like being in a good mood but sometimes don't want to be in a good mood.

From that short list, it seems that one ought to give more credence to "like" than "want." What I like doing, in the moment, correlates fairly well with conventional judgments of good behavior. (To be fair, some of what I like most -- learning about what interests me, friendly discussions/conversations -- are not particularly good behavior.)

But having kids, for instance, is something that people want but don't like, and it certainly falls into the good behavior category. Working a dull job for pay. Any kind of goal that is about the destination rather than the journey -- curing a disease or securing a civil right or a similar aim -- may well be a process you dislike. Exposing yourself to danger. I don't think these are failures to properly estimate future happiness, I think these are examples of not caring about future happiness. (This is a friend of mine's argument against utilitarianism -- there are things he wants that he knows he will not like, and he doesn't want anyone forcing him to make his opioids happy against his will.)

I would guess that liking is more uniform than wanting. You can choose to value almost anything, and therefore want almost anything. What you like may be neurologically determined. Which may be why in my observation "liking" corresponds so well with being healthy, productive, well-rounded, and so on; I suspect you like, in a rough sense, what is good for you. Whereas you may want a variety of things that are not good for you, whether in a destructive sense or a noble sense.

Does this liking/enjoying dichotomy explain the various flavours of erotic masochism?

I realize that I'm late to the game on this post, but I have to say that as economist, I found the take home point about revealed preference to be quite interesting, and it makes me wonder about the extent to which further neuroscience research will find systematic disjunctions in everyday circumstances between what motivates us and what gives us pleasure. Undoubtedly this would be leveraged into new sorts of paternalistic arguments... I'm guessing we'll need another decade or two before we have the neuropaternalist's equivalent of Nudge, however.

A University of Michigan study analyzed the brains of rats eating a favorite food. They found separate circuits for "wanting" and "liking", and were able to knock out either circuit without affecting the other (it was actually kind of cute - they measured the number of times the rats licked their lips as a proxy for "liking", though of course they had a highly technical rationale behind it).

One could come up with a story about how people are motivated to act selfishly but enjoy acting morally, which allows them to tell others a story about how virtuous they are while still pursuing their own selfish gain.

Rats! The neuroscientists were studying rats. It is troubling how easy it is to come up with these signalling stories to explain whatever observations we encounter.

What explanation can be suggested for a different mechanism for enjoying a food then motivation to get food that doesn't rely on impressing our little rat friends with our culinary sophistication?

A University of Michigan study analyzed the brains of rats eating a favorite food. They found separate circuits for "wanting" and "liking", and were able to knock out either circuit without affecting the other (it was actually kind of cute - they measured the number of times the rats licked their lips as a proxy for "liking", though of course they had a highly technical rationale behind it).

One could come up with a story about how people are motivated to act selfishly but enjoy acting morally, which allows them to tell others a story about how virtuous they are while still pursuing their own selfish gain.

Rats! The neuroscientists were studying rats. It is troubling how easy it is to come up with these signalling stories to explain whatever observations we encounter.

What explanation can be suggested for a different mechanism for enjoying a food then motivation to get food that doesn't rely on impressing our little rat friends with our culinary sophistication?

A University of Michigan study analyzed the brains of rats eating a favorite food. They found separate circuits for "wanting" and "liking", and were able to knock out either circuit without affecting the other (it was actually kind of cute - they measured the number of times the rats licked their lips as a proxy for "liking", though of course they had a highly technical rationale behind it).

One could come up with a story about how people are motivated to act selfishly but enjoy acting morally, which allows them to tell others a story about how virtuous they are while still pursuing their own selfish gain.

Rats! The neuroscientists were studying rats. It is troubling how easy it is to come up with these signalling stories to explain whatever observations we encounter.

What explanation can be suggested for a different mechanism for enjoying a food then motivation to get food that doesn't rely on impressing our little rat friends with our culinary sophistication?

A University of Michigan study analyzed the brains of rats eating a favorite food. They found separate circuits for "wanting" and "liking", and were able to knock out either circuit without affecting the other (it was actually kind of cute - they measured the number of times the rats licked their lips as a proxy for "liking", though of course they had a highly technical rationale behind it).

One could come up with a story about how people are motivated to act selfishly but enjoy acting morally, which allows them to tell others a story about how virtuous they are while still pursuing their own selfish gain.

Rats! The neuroscientists were studying rats. It is troubling how easy it is to come up with these signalling stories to explain whatever observations we encounter.

What explanation can be suggested for a different mechanism for enjoying a food then motivation to get food that doesn't rely on impressing our little rat friends with our culinary sophistication?

Seems like a pretty large leap from certain simple behaviours of rats to the natural-language meaning of "wanting" and "liking". Far-reaching claims such as this one should have strong evidence. Why not give humans drugs selective for either system and ask them? (Incidentally, at least with the dopamine system, this has been done millions of times ;) The opioids are a bit trickier because activating mu receptors (e.g. by means of opiates) will in turn cause a dopamine surge, too)

(Yes, I should just read the paper for their rationale, but can't be bothered right now...)

Edit: Sorry, editing messed up the formatting. Trying to fix...

Seems like a pretty large leap from certain behaviours of rats to the natural-language meaning of "wanting" and "liking". Far-reaching claims such as this one should have strong evidence. Why not give humans drugs selective for either system and ask them? (Incidentally, at least with the dopamine system, this has been done millions of times ;) The opioids are a bit trickier because activating mu receptors (e.g. by means of opiates) will in turn cause a dopamine surge, too)

(Yes, I should just read the paper for their rationale, but can't be bothered right now...)

One could come up with a story about how people are motivated to act selfishly but enjoy acting morally, which allows them to tell others a story about how virtuous they are while still pursuing their own selfish gain.

Surely that should read "while still pursuing their genes' selfish gain.", because if you do something that makes you less happy, you have not gained...

There is not a single utility qualia. There is a huge number of different kinds of qualia. Each kind of qualia is associated with a different amount of utility. For example, the qualia of red is zero utility. The qualia of fun is positive, as is the qualia of love. Even that's an oversimplification, as those each can refer to different kinds of qualia.

The mere idea of having separate qualia for "wanting" and "liking" means nothing.

The question is: are we estimating the utility of each kind of qualia correctly?

The more formal methods suggest that "wanting" is, if anything, more important than "liking", whereas intuitive methods say the reverse.

I suggest figuring out what causes us to intuitively give one answer.

Does the fact that we believe "wanting" is unimportant mean it is? Perhaps we're just lying about it to ourselves. It makes us happy, but we don't know it does. I think this is the same as saying we only feel it on a subconscious level. If so, the question is equivalent to asking if the subconscious mind feels qualia.