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How can pleasure be intrinsically experienced as good?

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Peter Morris

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Something I'm grappling with lately is how it is possible for physical pleasure to be an intrinsically 'positive' experience. Likewise, how pain is intrinsically experienced as a negative, unpleasant, bad experience.

 

A baby likes the taste of sweet and dislikes sour. A baby cries due to pain and laugh at funny faces. A baby has no conception of 'life as the standard of value'. This is also true of most adults who have no conception of life as the standard of value. Pleasure is just an end in itself, as 'happiness' is. Now I've heard it said that pleasure is supposed to be 'rigged' such that pleasure is a reward for an action that benefits one's life. But actually, evolution would have rigged it such that it was rigged to reward an action that benefits the propagation of one's genes. And that still does not answer why it is experienced as good. How could any chemical in the brain just be good in our subjective experience? Moreover, when an adult takes a drug, the pleasure pathways in the brain are activated, and people experience pleasure and positive feelings completely devoid of any cause. And the pleasure itself is experienced as good. The question to me is how and why? This may be more of a neuroscience question, but I cannot see how identifying which chemicals, which pathways and which parts of the brain are involved can explain why they are psychologically experienced as good.

 

It is perplexing to me.

Edited by Peter Morris
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Well, it's imprecise to say "pleasure is experienced as good". There is an experience. We consider it good if we like it. So it's not like you directly apprehend "goodness". Asking why it feels -this particular way- is to me like asking why ice needs to melt at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. It would be silly to ask "why couldn't it have been 33 degrees instead?" What else is there to say? It's just the nature of neural mechanisms.

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Well, it's imprecise to say "pleasure is experienced as good". There is an experience. We consider it good if we like it. So it's not like you directly apprehend "goodness". Asking why it feels -this particular way- is to me like asking why ice needs to melt at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. It would be silly to ask "why couldn't it have been 33 degrees instead?" What else is there to say? It's just the nature of neural mechanisms.

"We consider it good if we like it." - That's talking in circles. Why do we like it? Because it feels good.Why does it feel good? Because we like it. It doesn't answer the question.

 

The nature of any set of neural mechanisms doesn't have any goodness or badness in them. They just are. So why are they experienced as either good or bad by their nature?

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"We consider it good if we like it." - That's talking in circles. Why do we like it? Because it feels good.Why does it feel good? Because we like it. It doesn't answer the question.

It's evaluated as good, not experienced as good per se. I didn't say it feels good because we like it, I meant that it feels like what we call good because the neural mechanisms simply make it feel that way.

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It's evaluated as good, not experienced as good per se. I didn't say it feels good because we like it, I meant that it feels like what we call good because the neural mechanisms simply make it feel that way.

False. Babies don't evaluate pleasure as good. They don't sit there and go, this is a feeling I'm having, I wonder if it's good, well let me work that out, yes, I think I will evaluate this feeling to correspond to an objective good. No that's not how pleasure works. Pleasure simply feels good.

 

Once again you have talked in circles. "because the neural mechanisms simply make it feel that way (good)" My question is how could it do that?

 

And by the way, your ice example is inappropriate too. The reason ice melts at ice melts at 32 degrees is because the intermolecular forces between the H2O molecules which keep them in place in ice is not sufficient to keep them in place when they are given that much energy which causes them to slide past each other, thus the phase transition to liquid. And we can even go into reasons for the strengths of the intermolecular forces. But this is a physical question. We can look at neural mechanisms, but we see no 'good' anywhere in the nucleus accumbens, we see no 'good' in oxytocin or dopamine. They are just chemicals. How can pain feel bad, and how can pleasure feel good? Even before we have any conception of good or bad. Even animals seek pleasure, eat more tasty food, fornicate, enjoy being stroked, etc. They have no conception of 'this is good', it's just intrinsically experienced that way. And the question is how?

 

Edit: I think I'm stumbling into a question of what philosophers call 'qualia', which I'd heard of, but not looked into much. I have a lot of reading to do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

Edited by Peter Morris
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False. Babies don't evaluate pleasure as good. They don't sit there and go, this is a feeling I'm having, I wonder if it's good, well let me work that out, yes, I think I will evaluate this feeling to correspond to an objective good. No that's not how pleasure works. Pleasure simply feels good.

Right, as in a baby won't form the concept for a while, so it's more like what a dog thinks as good. Once older, they're able to abstract the experience into a concept. So good is a term to refer to that type of experience, at least on epistemological theories that accepts concepts as "grounded" in perception as Objectivism does. The experience is not itself perception of good, we refer to the experience as good. As you said, we see no good.

You are right about why ice melts, but it doesn't say why it has to act in THAT way. Why not do something else? Why does reality have that nature?

The neural mechanisms to provide for experiences to be as they are or to produce experiences are so far not too detailed. But why it feels THAT way has to be taken as it is, at its level of abstraction.

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Something I'm grappling with lately is how it is possible for physical pleasure to be an intrinsically 'positive' experience. Likewise, how pain is intrinsically experienced as a negative, unpleasant, bad experience.

 

A baby likes the taste of sweet and dislikes sour. A baby cries due to pain and laugh at funny faces. A baby has no conception of 'life as the standard of value'. This is also true of most adults who have no conception of life as the standard of value. Pleasure is just an end in itself, as 'happiness' is. Now I've heard it said that pleasure is supposed to be 'rigged' such that pleasure is a reward for an action that benefits one's life. But actually, evolution would have rigged it such that it was rigged to reward an action that benefits the propagation of one's genes. And that still does not answer why it is experienced as good. How could any chemical in the brain just be good in our subjective experience? Moreover, when an adult takes a drug, the pleasure pathways in the brain are activated, and people experience pleasure and positive feelings completely devoid of any cause. And the pleasure itself is experienced as good. The question to me is how and why? This may be more of a neuroscience question, but I cannot see how identifying which chemicals, which pathways and which parts of the brain are involved can explain why they are psychologically experienced as good.

 

It is perplexing to me.

What do you mean "experienced as good"? What you are describing are sensations. They are neither good nor bad, they just are. You even give examples of pleasure being bad (drugs).

 

And things aren't "experienced" to be good or bad, they are judged to be good or bad. I'm sure Mother Teresa for instance judged most pleasures to be bad, and most pain to be good. An Objectivist does the opposite. And so does a baby. And yes, a baby does indeed have a basic ethical system, where he judges things that cause it pleasure to be good, and things that cause it pain to be bad.

 

False. Babies don't evaluate pleasure as good. They don't sit there and go, this is a feeling I'm having, I wonder if it's good, well let me work that out, yes, I think I will evaluate this feeling to correspond to an objective good. No that's not how pleasure works. Pleasure simply feels good.

Pleasure feels good is a tautology. The definition of pleasure is: sensations that feel good. That says nothing about why they feel good. They most certainly don't just "simply feel good", there is a variety of reasons for it. Little children for instance often end up hating foods they're supposed to like, for reasons that are psychological not biological: they decided to hate them, independent of their taste buds.

And yes, of course there is a biological component to sensations being pleasurable. Ethics doesn't have to be removed from our biological nature. Our ethical evaluations often coincide with biology. But they are still our evaluations. You can't speak of good or bad without ethical evaluation.

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You are right about why ice melts, but it doesn't say why it has to act in THAT way. Why not do something else? Why does reality have that nature?

Oh, I see what you mean there. Reality itself is a primary without explanation because it would basically require explaining it in terms of something outside reality. Agreed on that point.

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