Does enhancing one’s mood / increasing one’s hedonic set-point and making one more resistant to suffering fall within your definition of mind enhancement? I think a case can be made that wellbeing can be hugely empowering (an intuition pump: imagine waking up in an extremely good mood, w/ a sense of things to be done…). David Pearce may be the most prominent EA writing on (e.g. one, two) and promoting (and defending) this type of mind enhancement. And then there is one EA-aligned organization working in this area as well, called Invincible Wellbeing.
I’d be glad to hear your thoughts on this, especially if you disagree that wellbeing should be a significant part of mind enhancement. Thanks :)
Great points, thanks! I think the well-being enhancements you describe definitely fit this post’s definition of mind enhancement and could in many ways also affect ‘Benevolence, Intelligence, Power’ (especially ‘Power’). This means that in this regard most of the post’s considerations would equally apply to well-being enhancements too.
However, the aspects I list mostly focus on the instrumental implications of mind enhancements, i.e. how they could increase/decrease effective-altruist impact done by certain actors/society. As the enhancements you describe could be seen as constituting direct impact on QoL/QALY, other considerations would also become important.
E.g. in some cases there could be trade-offs like certain well-being enhancements enhancing subjective quality of life but decreasing ‘Benevolence, Intelligence, Power’. In such a case, expected desirability would depend a lot on your set of assumptions regarding the world like existential risk, long-termism, which could make it much harder to draw any definitive conclusions there.
Definitely a very interesting sub-area and probably also very neglected and worthy of thorough EA examination! :)
Does enhancing one’s mood / increasing one’s hedonic set-point and making one more resistant to suffering fall within your definition of mind enhancement? I think a case can be made that wellbeing can be hugely empowering (an intuition pump: imagine waking up in an extremely good mood, w/ a sense of things to be done…). David Pearce may be the most prominent EA writing on (e.g. one, two) and promoting (and defending) this type of mind enhancement. And then there is one EA-aligned organization working in this area as well, called Invincible Wellbeing.
I’d be glad to hear your thoughts on this, especially if you disagree that wellbeing should be a significant part of mind enhancement. Thanks :)
Great points, thanks!
I think the well-being enhancements you describe definitely fit this post’s definition of mind enhancement and could in many ways also affect ‘Benevolence, Intelligence, Power’ (especially ‘Power’). This means that in this regard most of the post’s considerations would equally apply to well-being enhancements too.
However, the aspects I list mostly focus on the instrumental implications of mind enhancements, i.e. how they could increase/decrease effective-altruist impact done by certain actors/society. As the enhancements you describe could be seen as constituting direct impact on QoL/QALY, other considerations would also become important.
E.g. in some cases there could be trade-offs like certain well-being enhancements enhancing subjective quality of life but decreasing ‘Benevolence, Intelligence, Power’. In such a case, expected desirability would depend a lot on your set of assumptions regarding the world like existential risk, long-termism, which could make it much harder to draw any definitive conclusions there.
Definitely a very interesting sub-area and probably also very neglected and worthy of thorough EA examination! :)