Either your brain discovers a "non-happiness" way to motivate itself toward new goals, which would end up a less effective proxy for happiness, or you lose your ability to have goals altogether, in which case I think you literally do nothing at all?
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Replying to @FrankBigTime @chaosprime
We already have lots of non-happiness ways of motivating ourselves. Fear, for example -- it currently affects our happiness level but that's not its mechanism for working. You act to avoid the thing you're afraid of, not the fear itself.
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Replying to @terrycloth11 @FrankBigTime
tbf i think it would be an extraordinary claim to say that you can't be happy and afraid at the same time
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Replying to @chaosprime @terrycloth11
Can you develop a fear if nothing ever reduces your happiness? Or, granting that the OP imposes fixed happiness after a life that has developed some fears, do those fears still motivate if they are magically opposed by the mechanism that keeps your happiness level constant?
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Replying to @FrankBigTime @chaosprime
I don't think the mechanisms are at all related. For example, you want things that aren't directly 'happiness' and that in practice don't even increase happiness, and you fear losing them. Pain would still hurt even if you were happy while feeling it, and you'd fear it.
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I mean -- I'm not a neuroscientist so this could be wrong? But I feel like I've experienced these scenarios personally. Stubbing my toe doesn't throw me into depression.
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Replying to @terrycloth11 @chaosprime
If stubbing my toe causes me pain, but my overall happiness is magically fixed, there must have been some compensating pleasure/contentment/whatever to exactly balance out the negative from the pain. They can be separate mechanisms and still sum to no motivation.
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Replying to @FrankBigTime @chaosprime
Motivations don't get summed? You get a specific motivation to not stub your toe again and if you need to be extra happy to counteract that (which doesn't make sense to me; I think there's some clash of definitions here) it'll be unfocused.
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Pain is kind of a weird example though since some people seek it out on purpose.
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Replying to @terrycloth11 @chaosprime
I don't think I develop a specific motivation to not stub my toe. My body has instincts to flinch from pain, yes, but if my happiness isn't lessened when I stub my toe, I will not bother avoiding the situation, because flinching away from pain is just data, not suffering.
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i don’t think your conscious suffering or lack thereof is inside the operant conditioning loop
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Replying to @chaosprime @terrycloth11
I keep going back and forth in trying to respond. I feel like developing from avoiding pain into avoiding situations that cause pain into weighing complicated predictions about situations to minimize pain is what consciousness IS (along with the positive complement).
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