I wonder if you’re Goodharting yourself (as in Goodhart’s law) or oversimplifying. Your emotions reflect what you care about and serve to motivate you to act on what you care about. They’re one particular way your goals (and your impressions of how satisfied/frustrated they are or will be) are aggregated, but you shouldn’t forget that there are separately valuable goals there.
I wouldn’t say someone can’t be selfless just because they want to help others and helping others satisfies this desire or makes them happy. And I definitely wouldn’t say their only goal is to be happy in the moment. They have a goal to help others, and they feel good or bad depending on how much they think they’re helping others.
EDIT: Also, it could be that things might feel more right/less wrong without feeling emotionally/hedonically/affectively better. I’m not sure all of my judgements have an affective component, or one that lines up with how preferable something is.
Maybe part of the brain just wants to be happy, and other parts of the brain condition rewards of happiness on alignment with various other goals like helping others or using spreadsheets.
I wonder if you’re Goodharting yourself (as in Goodhart’s law) or oversimplifying. Your emotions reflect what you care about and serve to motivate you to act on what you care about. They’re one particular way your goals (and your impressions of how satisfied/frustrated they are or will be) are aggregated, but you shouldn’t forget that there are separately valuable goals there.
I wouldn’t say someone can’t be selfless just because they want to help others and helping others satisfies this desire or makes them happy. And I definitely wouldn’t say their only goal is to be happy in the moment. They have a goal to help others, and they feel good or bad depending on how much they think they’re helping others.
EDIT: Also, it could be that things might feel more right/less wrong without feeling emotionally/hedonically/affectively better. I’m not sure all of my judgements have an affective component, or one that lines up with how preferable something is.
Maybe part of the brain just wants to be happy, and other parts of the brain condition rewards of happiness on alignment with various other goals like helping others or using spreadsheets.