Suppose that you could live for an extraordinary amount of time, and could choose any sort of life you wanted. Would you choose to relive, endlessly, the same maximally-good experience over and over again? Or would you instead choose to live through a wide variety of extremely-wonderful experiences?
I think most of us would clearly prefer the latter, and not merely because we would worry we’d get bored otherwise — we could stipulate that the maximally-good experience is one where one never feels bored. Rather, we have an intrinsic preference for variety.
Again, the problem is that it’s almost impossible to genuinely hold that stipulation in our heads. We just can’t psychologically comprehend the part “is one where one never feels bored”, because nothing in human experience mirrors that.
When a thought experiment explicitly stipulates that boredom is locked at zero, we can’t let our real-world psychology smuggle it back in under the guise of an “intrinsic preference.” If we truly accept the premise as stated—that the experience remains maximally good indefinitely without decay—then rejecting it based on “variety” seems just a psychological trap.
Again, the problem is that it’s almost impossible to genuinely hold that stipulation in our heads. We just can’t psychologically comprehend the part “is one where one never feels bored”, because nothing in human experience mirrors that.
When a thought experiment explicitly stipulates that boredom is locked at zero, we can’t let our real-world psychology smuggle it back in under the guise of an “intrinsic preference.” If we truly accept the premise as stated—that the experience remains maximally good indefinitely without decay—then rejecting it based on “variety” seems just a psychological trap.