The Wikipedia article seems to only cover the conceptual idea, and I remembered that there has been a concrete implementation, too. After a short google, I found at least this Atlantic article:
In New Mexico, not too far from where the original Trinity test was held, is the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Almost 2 million cubic feet of radioactive waste is buried half a mile deep in the 250-million year old salt deposit. The plant will continue to receive nuclear sludge from around the country until 2070, when it will be sealed up for good. The government half-heartedly anticipated the dangers to future humans and settled on surrounding the plant with obelisks containing messages in Spanish, Navajo, Chinese, Latin, Hebrew, and English.
I also appreciate these posts, thanks Lukas. A few reactions from someone who still finds hedonism-inspired moral realism very intuitively convincing, not particularly sure about any of this though:
I think this dichotomy is losing something. Here is how I currently think about it:
There are algorithmic processes that underlie what some neuroscientists call the global neuronal workspace. I currently think of “hedonist value” as a subprocess of the workspace that can introduce the features “good”/”bad”/”unsatisfactory”/etc. in our inner world simulation that is expressed in the global neuronal workspace. For example, while enjoying a sweet fruit, not only will our inner simulation include features of it’s sweetness and sourness, it will also include the feature goodness.
The component of our global workspace to “express” features of goodness/badness/worthiness/meaningfulness/etc. is what I currently have in mind when thinking of bedrock intrinsic values. These features are expressed for things that our ancestors were selected for, e.g.
sweet tastes,
mates with historically high reproductive value
and that we learned to value, e.g.
socially approved accomplishments like winning a game, getting a job
Given what I said before, my hedonism-inspired moral realism wouldn’t claim that things like valuing sweet fruits is incorrect, just that we can take a step back in explaining why we seek out and like sweet fruits: because evolution equipped us with algorithms that can express something like “assigning intrinsic goodness to something”. So it’s not wrong to value sweet fruits, just that in my view the world doesn’t lose any value if our brains all switch to enjoying the taste of plain cooked potatoes like we enjoyed sweet fruit beforehand.
I expect this is true for many people who find hedonism intuitive: using “pleasure” as a shorthand for “everything hedonism-inspired theories value” often feels a bit frustrating because it’s so easy to then do a move like “Aha, but clearly not everything is these lower pleasures!”. E.g. for the example with the family, I think the experience of meaning and love and caring for others, and even “rightness”, are different ways how our global neuronal workspace expresses that something is intrinsically valuable. I wonder if there’s a better word that summarises it better than pleasure.