If I could take a magic pill that made me happy, effective, and efficient all day long, every day, would I take it?
Emphatically, no.
Why not? Would I not be doing God’s will more effectively? Would even prayer and meditation not be better, because I could ‘love God’ joyfully as commanded? Would I not be easier to live with? Would I not improve the lives of more people?
Firstly, I want to experience l life as it is (which is a complex interaction between the facts of the world, how I choose to live in it, and how I construe what is going on). If I were chemically altered, I would not be experiencing life. I would be experiencing the effects of the pill. Essentially, I want to be sober, and the magic pill would not allow me to be sober. I want reality, not virtual reality. I want to smell flowers, not factory-made perfume. I want strawberry ice cream with real strawberries, not ice cream flavoured with some strawberry-proximate chemical. I want interaction with a human being, not a robot. I want to see look at art created by a human being, not AI ‘art’. I want to sleep, not be knocked out.
Secondly, the taste of food flows from the nature of the food. Good food tastes good; poisoned food (usually) tastes bad. I would not take a pill to make everything taste nice even if it were poisoned or off. Similarly, the emotions are not free-flowing cataracts but signals of the substance of my physical and mental life. Each emotion is one side of a coin, with the other side of the coin some aspect of what I believe, think, or do, whether actively or in response to an external event. Cut off the emotion and I’m cutting off the access to the other side of the coin, and I’m cutting off my only reliable way of distinguishing what is actually going on in my life. I’m cutting myself off from the control panel and all the buttons. If I cannot tell what the buttons are doing, I don’t know which ones to press. They all become the same. Everything would taste nice, even poison.
Thirdly, the value of life lies in accomplishment. What that accomplishment is is up for grabs, in other words one must choose a value system and live by it. It is by that value system that accomplishment is measured. In Sparky’s Magic Piano, a kid has a magic piano that enables him to play anything he wishes, but it is the piano’s accomplishment not his. Eventually the piano stops complying, and there is a nightmare scene where Sparky, at a concert in New York, is left helplessly banging the keys with his fists. He learns from this and decides, instead, he must practise. The magic pill would be the same. I would be placed at the destination of life: happiness, effectiveness, and efficiency, even in pursuit of Higher Things, Holy Things. But there would be no value. I would not have done anything. The magic pill would have done it. It would be the magic pill’s achievement. I would be left all the way behind at the starting line of life.