Illusionists should try to build hedonium

Epistemic status: I feel reasonably confident (~75%) that some form of this is a worthwhile project. Looking for feedback to reduce that uncertainty.“Hedonium” is a theoretical, minimally conscious substance optimized for experiencing happiness. Imagine a mind pared down to the bare essentials required for having happy experiences, instantiated as cheaply as possible.Nobody has built hedonium yet. Nobody has tried to build hedonium yet. Nobody has even laid out the blueprint for how you would try to build hedonium yet.It doesn’t seem impossible. 55% of philosophers of mind are physicalists: they believe that mental states just are physical states. Even non-physicalist philosophers of mind often believe that the mental and physical are tightly bound up—creating new brains, at the very least, creates new subjects of experience.But maybe it’s just intractable. Lots of people seem to believe that conscious is unknowable and mysterious from the perspective of third-person science. Even if you know exactly what’s happening in someone’s brain, you can never really know what they’re experiencing. We can, at most, try to build cargo cult hedonium: bang together a bunch of the “correlates of consciousness” and hope that it creates a happy conscious subject.But there is a philosophical approach which do not believe that consciousness is specially intractable: illusionism. Illusionism accepts the obvious fact that experiences are real: when I burn my finger, it hurts! However, illusionism denies that experiences have these special metaphysical properties like privacy, ineffability, certainty, and an essentially intrinsic nature which many philosophers saddle them with. My experience of pain is not “generated by” or “correlated with” some brain state, it is that state. When I burn my finger, I am not mistaken that it hurts—but I am mistaken if I think “hurting” is something fundamentally immaterial which eludes functional description. (I describe this view more fully in §1.)If i