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Comment by ptr_void | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand people's obsession with happiness. It always seemed like a very weird and arbitrary metric. Orgasms makes people happy, perhaps we, as species should come together and fund/help build the constant orgasm machine, we will all be very happy.

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It's a very, almost uniquely, western thing and has some roots in liberalism (philosophical not political), ironically heavily influenced though a bastardization of the epicurean philosophical tradition. There are plenty of philosophies and traditions that understand otherwise. Stoicism being one of the biggest counterbalances.

Pleasure and happiness are two very different concepts

A quick search tells me pleasure is temporary happiness; a constant orgasm machine should be able to fix that.

Happiness is much more profound than pleasure, it is not simply long lasting pleasure.

We already have a constant orgasm machine, it's called heroin. However, heroin users don't seem particularly happy if you ask them, no matter how much pleasure they have

That's because it's not a constant machine, and is in fact interrupted constantly, sometimes by an early death. If we actually come up with a machine that is truly constant and stable, it will be the end of civilization as we know it. People might think that they would never fall for it and would never just stay in a room hooked to something like that but that comes from a misunderstanding of the power this hypothetical machine holds. Looking at the lengths a heroin addict will go to secure diminishing returns should give anyone a hint of the terrible potency of such an invention.

There's a short story published on the web that, if I remember right, examines the concept, called The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. Note: some of the story is extremely graphically NSFW.

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