This fits with the idea that meaning comes from pleasure, and that great pleasure can be worth a fair amount of pain to achieve. The pain drains meaning away, but the redeeming factor is that it can serve as a test of the magnitude of pleasure, and generate pleasurable stories in the future. An important counter argument to my hypothesis is how we may find a privileged “high road” to success and pleasure to be less meaningful. This at first might seem to suggest that we do inherently value pain. In fact, though, what frustrates people about people born with a silver spoon in their mouths is that society seems set up to ensure their pleasure at another’s expense. It’s not their success or pleasure we dislike. It’s the barriers and pain that we think it’s contextualized in. If pleasure for one means pain for another, then of course we find the pleasure to be less meaningful. So this isn’t about short-term pain avoidance. It’s about long-term, overall, wise and systemic pursuit of pleasure. And that pleasure must be not only in the physical experiences we have, but in the stories we tell about it - the way we interpret life. We should look at it, and see that it is good. If people are wireheading, and we look at that tendency and it causes us great displeasure, that is indeed an argument against wireheading. We need to understand that there’s no single bucket where pleasure can accumulate. There is a psychological reward system where pleasure is evaluated according to the sensory input and brain state. Utilitarian hedonism isn’t just about nerve endings. It’s about how we interpret them. If we have a major aesthetic objection to wireheading, that counts from where we’re standing, no matter how much you rachet up the presumed pleasure of wireheading. The same goes recursively for any “hack” that could justify wireheading. For example, say you posited that wireheading would be seen as morally good, if only we could find a catchy moral justification for it. So w