> What happens when the Hoover Dam starts cracking? Or when a new disease is found and a new cure needs to be found? Or when we run out of a resource (oil, helium, it doesn't really matter which)?

Then we'll be happy about it

And be dead? Is that OK?

Presumably. Besides if all we do is sit around taking a happy drug, we'd stop reproducing. We wouldn't need the Hoover Dam or a new virus to wipe us out.

In most systems of metaethics, "years of life" and "number of people alive" are coefficients or integrands. 50 years spent happy--and then dying happily--is less good than 100 years spent happy. Which is less good, in turn, than 100 years spent happy, and creating two more people who also spend 100 years happy. And so on.

However, the adaptations we execute, as biological beings, don't really care about the health and welfare of their own far-future selves; they're more concerned about the Net Present Value of different choices they can make. So, one hour spent Really Happy, outweighs a year spent Just Happy, because that Really Happy is all received by your present self.

So we can do the math as rational beings, and as much as we want to be rational (which is itself a function of our biologically-trained impulses), we can look out for our future selves and keep the world running. Or we can accept our nature as natural beings, and wirehead. It's really the explicated meaning-of-life question, going forward.

>So, one hour spent Really Happy, outweighs a year spent Just Happy, because that Really Happy is all received by your present self.

I find making decisions that end up along lines of this really, really difficult. The rational part of my brain knows very well which one should I choose, but it has really, really hard time arguing with that more... I don't know, primal? part of me.

I think it's really fascinating, how relatively weak our conscious self is in arguments with our short term desires.

There's something even more fascinating you can learn if you introspect on this topic during an experience with a dopaminergic compound (e.g. cocaine, Adderall.)

Exerting exactly this type of willpower (setting long-term goals before short-term rewards) is what "spends" dopamine in the brain. The more dopamine you have available, the longer-term you tend to plan. And when you run dry, you feel "restless" and want to do things "on a whim."

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In the face of this, it's really quite fascinating how meaningless a term like "willpower" becomes. Doing what you want-to-want to do basically comes down to:

A. having enough dopamine in the first place (children should really get checked for ADD/ADHD at about the same time get checked for nearsightedness),

and B. making pre-commitments with strong consequences for reneging (e.g., losing money you've bet; or making you look low-status to people you care about.)

There's nothing else to it.

Evolution meats nihilism!

There is a reason we appear to be physicaly unable to experiment that kind of happiness this thread is talking about. The only question is what we'll choose once we are able to change our own brains to make it possible, but then, that's a completely unkown context, so we'll probably choose some option that we can't even imagine today.

But the answer we give now to the question of what will we do tells us something about us, regardless of whether we're actually right or not. Which, in addition, is what good science fiction does; paraphrasing Ursula Le Guin, it invents lies to tell the truth about who we are, right now.

That'd be for the better of 99% of the other living species on Earth.