i'm really interested in ways of measuring hedonic tone, and creating units for it
here's one i like:
a genie comes to you, and proposes a trade: "i'll delete your experience of this last hour, but in return i'll give you the experience of one minute of an MDMA trip. do you take the deal?"
"what? NO!" you say with indignation
"ahh, but think on it. on MDMA you feel more intensely. a minute feels much longer, more vivid, more meaningful. think of how much beauty is contained in that one minute. think of how, when you first tried MDMA, you were shocked it was even possible to be so happy"
you think on it, and the genie is right (admittedly this measurement requires that you've tried MDMA, but i'll get to that later)
the genie continues, "but in this last hour of your life, what was the most meaningful moment? how many moments were even noteworthy at all?"
while reading this, i encourage you to pause and try to answer this question. feel into the memory of the last hour, and get a sense of how much it was worth to you. and do the same for a minute of peak MDMA
you might tell the genie "ok, i see where you're going. but a whole hour for a minute is not enough"
"you drive a hard bargain," the genie grumbles. "how about 5 minutes of MDMA, in exchange for the last two hours?"
unless your experience of day-to-day life is much better than mine, or your experience of MDMA is much worse, this deal should start to sound pretty appealing
you respond: "let's scale it up! i'll give you ten hours for 25 minutes instead. the ratio stays the same, i'd just like to buy more"
"deal!" the genie exclaims
with this transaction, you've measured your current experience at about 0.0416 MDMA-seconds per second (divide 25 minutes by 10 hours)
in other words, your hedonic tone is 1/20th that of a peak MDMA experience
we might want to call the unit "MDMA-second" a "hedon" and then naturally "MDMA-seconds per second" would be "hedon/s"
this unit can both be used for positive and negative experiences. if you were in agony, the genie could offer to delete it in exchange for also deleting a few minutes of your next MDMA experience. that'd give you a negative hedon/s
now, the trouble comes in finding a reference point for the hedon.
what makes MDMA a good candidate:
- forceful and reliable; unlike psychedelics, the effects are more reliably positive in a specific kind of way. it's less sensitive to set and setting
- extremely strong; it neatly illustrates how steep the scale is
the problems with MDMA as a reference point:
- it's unhealthy & illegal; most have not done it, for good reason
- you can't do it often; and memory decays quickly, so it's hard to accurately compare e.g. a year old memory to a current experience
- loss of magic; MDMA gets less potent with each use, so a 7th-MDMA-trip-second is not equal to a 1st-MDMA-trip-second
i'm super interested in other base experiences to use for the hedon. the ideal would be:
- 100% reproducible, meaning no variation in pleasantness between each experience
- short, safe experience
- intensely positive
if you have any ideas, let me know on twitter