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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2020-12-28 03:56 am (UTC)I've been percolating this for a few days now, and I'm still not sure how to put it or if I even understand it myself.
I feel like, as I experience it...the fundamental joy† is the joy of being oneself. This isn't a binary state, and as such "survival" isn't all there is to it: of course a living me is far more me than a dead me, a me with better recall is more me than a me with worse recall, but also I can embody Me-ness to greater or lesser extents through the pursuit of things I care about. When things are going well I feel *coherent*, in alignment with myself.
I mean, that kind of kicks the can down the road to "but *why* do you care about those things?", and I guess it depends. I don't always understand why I want something, or what makes some things ego-syntonic and others ego-dystonic. Maybe some things just ground out directly in neurology.
A lot of things *do* ground out in safety: not everything, but more than you might think. I tend to default to safety-based justifications for actions where they exist, and when that's your default you find those justifications are available in a whole lot of places where people don't normally talk about them. Probably other people often don't notice them: I know *I* struggle a *lot* to continue analysing reasons to support a course of action after I've satisfied myself that it's worthwhile, so if something is worthwhile for self-preservation reasons I usually don't know whether or not it's also independently worthwhile for other reasons. It's very, very hard for me to run thought experiments of "okay, but if we *ignore* that aspect, is X *still* good?".
---
†It's hard to find a good word here, since there are so many words with subtly different meanings that are often used in different ways by different people. I considered "pleasure" or "satisfaction", but I didn't want anything that seemed like it would cover orgasms because--in spite of OP dude using "perpetual orgasms" as a wireheading example--orgasms very much lack this thing (for me; they do seem to possess it for many other people). I feel like "happiness" refers more to a state one can reach in a variety of ways rather than any kind of wellspring, but maybe not all idiolects agree. ↩