David Deutsch: preference

Transcript context

…I do want to talk about the Fun criteria. Is your definition of fun, different from how other people define other positive emotions like eudaimonia, or well being, or satisfaction, is “fun” a different emotion? I don't think it's an emotion. And all these things are not very well defined. They can't possibly be very well defined until we have a satisfactory theory of qualia at least, and probably a more satisfactory theory of creativity, how creativity works, and so on. I think that the choice of the word fun for the thing that I explained more precisely, but still not very precisely as, as a “creation of knowledge where the different kinds of knowledge in explicit, unconscious, conscious explicit, are all in harmony with each other. ” That is actually the only way in which the everyday usage of the word fun differs from that is that fun is considered frivolous, or seeking fun is considered as seeking frivolity. But that isn't so much a different use of the word , it's just a different pejorative theory about whether this is a good or bad thing. But nevertheless, I can't define it precisely. The important thing is that there is a thing which has this property of “fun” that you can't, you can't compulsorily enact. So, in some views, no pain, no gain, well, then you can find out mechanically, whether the thing is causing pain, and whether it's doing it according to the theory that says that you will have gain if you have that pain, and so on. So, that can all be done mechanically, and therefore, it is subject to criticism. Another way of looking at the Fun theory is that it’s some mode of criticism. This is subject to the criticism that this isn't fun, ie. This is privileging one kind of knowledge arbitrarily over another rather than being rational and letting content decide. Is this placing a limitation on universal explainers? If they can create some theory about why a thing could or should be fun? Why could anything be fun? It seems to be that sometimes we actually can make things fun that aren't like, for example, take exercise, no pain, no gain is like when you first go, it's not fun. But, once you start going, you understand the mechanics, you develop a theory for why CAD should be fun?…

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