Deconstructing the riddle of experience vs. memory

If I were Kahneman and I had posed that riddle, I would object that the entire point of the thought experiment is to consider the activity as being of no future utility whatsoever. Just observing the way people behave every day, most of us choose to indulge in pleasures that have no future utility (and in some cases have negative future utility) all the time. We eat junk food, watch TV, waste time watching cat videos. Things that would not obviously be missed if they could not be got.

I think your confusion comes from an underspecification of the initial problem. Are only your memories reset, leaving more subtle personality or physical changes in place (Where did this tan come from?!? Why am I so relaxed?), or are your brain and body (and the rest of the world) entirely reset to the way it was before you went on the vacation? Really, the problem doesn't specify what it means by "not remember the trip" well enough.

Part of what prevents me from understanding the riddle is that I believe vacations are worth more than the memories and photos: vacations change you.

Not if everything is reset back to the way it was!

I think the problem is meant to imply that there would be no way of ever telling you were on the trip; if you took a vacation and then afterwards your body and mind were reset to the way they were before the trip, as were everyone else's, and all evidence of the trip was destroyed, would you take it? Your list of vacation features are all things that, to me, are implicitly implied to be reverted back to previous settings after the vacation.

From Yudkowsky's Epistle to the New York Less Wrongians:

Knowing about scope insensitivity and diminishing marginal returns doesn't just mean that you donate charitable dollars to "existential risks that few other people are working on", instead of "The Society For Curing Rare Diseases In Cute Puppies". It means you know that eating half a chocolate brownie appears as essentially the same pleasurable memory in retrospect as eating a whole brownie, so long as the other half isn't in front of you and you don't have the unpleasant memory of exerting willpower not to eat it.

If you mainly value brownie-eating memories, this is perfectly reasonable advice. If you instead you eat brownies for the experience, it is unhelpful, since eating half a brownie means the experience is either half as long or less intense.

Is this the sort of thing you're looking for?

I think the issue runs deeper, I call it the "Is the future you always right?" problem.

Consider a classic willpower problem, you want to lose weight but you also want to eat that cake. It is a debate between current you, who wants to enjoy the cake, and future you, who wants to be not fat. Time preference / time discounting and all that. The issue is, if you always choose current self, you will be an unhealthy addicted trainwreck, and if you alway choose future self, you per definition never enjoy anything now. Usually people say the virtuous thing to do is to choose your future self. But is it?

Another way to think about it: suppose your timeline is forked, and in one fork you go on vacation. That timeline is subsequently terminated, after "the experience" happens. Leaving aside the moral issues of terminating a timeline (say, you have no choice in the matter, laws of physics force it, etc.), would you want the fork to happen? This should be easier to deal with, as it has zero consequences for the other timeline.

I could imagine calling all the changes that take place in one's mind due to an event as the memory of that event - not just the ones that involve conscious recall. Still, to be a little more general, I would maybe frame it as process vs. consequences.

Though honestly I'm more interested in understanding the different types of mind-changes it is useful to have names for.

I think it might be better to remove the other effects. If you could pick between having fun and remembering having fun, all else being equal, which would you choose?

You can actually do something very similar to going on vacation and not remembering it. For example, you can go on ten vacations and only remember one of them. The way to do this is access a quantum random number generator that gives you a number between 0 and 1 and go on one vacation if the value is between 0 and 0.1, a different vacation if the value is between 0.1 and 0.2, etc. Now because of many worlds interpretation you have experienced all ten vacations, but will only remember one.

Now that you realise that "you" can experience so much more than you can remember, will you actually do it?