Peter and Valentine: Dopamine Tubes

Peter: Hey Val, I’ve been thinking about this hypothetical. Imagine you were given the option to use a dopamine tube. For the rest of your natural life, you’d sit in a container where you were injected with drugs that would make you feel the highest dopamine-induced pleasure you could possibly feel, maybe simulating your life as it is now, but better. You could even construct a whole bunch of these dopamine tubes for a whole community.

Valentine: That sounds a lot like the experience machine thought experiment, but sure.

Peter: So would you go into the dopamine tube?

Valentine: No, I don’t think so. What about you?

Peter: I think I would. If one values pleasure in life, and one is trying to maximize it, the dopamine tube is the way to go.

Valentine: That’s already debatable — one big problem with pleasure utilitarianism — well, utilitarianism in general — is that it’s not well-defined. The idea of “maximizing pleasure” doesn’t specify what time frame should be considered.

Peter: Well, we can consider our whole lives — mathematically, we’d use some weighted sum of our pleasure time-series (WATO) — not just the short-term nor just the long-term. Fair, it’s not totally clear. But the dopamine tube is like a limitless source of happiness, an infinity coefficient — regardless of how you measure it, don’t you think the right choice is going to be to hop in the tube?