A question here is whether “interests to not suffer” are analogous to “interests in experiencing joy.” I believe that Michael’s point is that, while we cannot imagine suffering without some kind of interest to have it stop (at least in the moment itself), we can imagine a mind that does not care for further joy.
I don’t think that’s the relevant analogy though. We should be comparing “Can we imagine suffering without an interest in not having suffered?” to “Can we imagine joy without an interest in having experienced joy?”
Let’s say I see a cute squirrel and it makes me happy. Is it bad that I’m not in virtual reality experiencing the greatest joys imagineable?
I can imagine saying “no” here, but if I do then I’d also say it’s not good that you are not in a virtual reality experiencing great suffering. If you were in a virtual reality experiencing great joy it would be against your interests to prevent that joy, and if you were in a virtual reality experiencing great suffering it would be in your interests to prevent that suffering.
You could say: the actually existing person has an interest in preventing future suffering, while they may have no interest in experiencing future joy. But now the asymmetry is just coming from the actual person’s current interests in joy and suffering, so we didn’t need to bring in all of this other machinery, we can just directly appeal to the claimed asymmetry in interests.
I don’t think that’s the relevant analogy though. We should be comparing “Can we imagine suffering without an interest in not having suffered?” to “Can we imagine joy without an interest in having experienced joy?”
I can imagine saying “no” here, but if I do then I’d also say it’s not good that you are not in a virtual reality experiencing great suffering. If you were in a virtual reality experiencing great joy it would be against your interests to prevent that joy, and if you were in a virtual reality experiencing great suffering it would be in your interests to prevent that suffering.
You could say: the actually existing person has an interest in preventing future suffering, while they may have no interest in experiencing future joy. But now the asymmetry is just coming from the actual person’s current interests in joy and suffering, so we didn’t need to bring in all of this other machinery, we can just directly appeal to the claimed asymmetry in interests.