I don't mean how these things came about and I understand basic chemicals and their affect on our physiology ect. What I really want to know is why the feeling I get when I am hurt is displeasing while the feeling I get when I have sex is pleasing. Any answers philosophy subreddit?
Posted Jun 7, 2010, 1:22 AM UTC
as cyrano111 said, it's a circular argument. The qualitative state caused by either beneficial or harmful action is known as pleasure or pain, respectively, for it's ability to reinforce or dissuade said behavior. A rose by any other name....
As to the the actual feeling of pain or pleasure, that is the essence of the Hard Problem in consciousness, specifically the problem of explaining qualia.
A more appropriate question is this: what would a successful answer to your question look like, in principle? Is there any coherent possible answer? Currently, we don't know.
Thank you very ,very, very much! I genuinely didn't know how to phrase my question, which explains why so many people thought I was posing a question explained by evolution. It has been irking me for quite some time now and despite my asking several different people you are the only one who knew what I meant... thanks again aspartame_junky.
I doubt it has anything at all to do with philosophy and everything to do with biology.
Things that cause pain are generally things that will also cause damage to our bodies: burns, cuts, blisters, muscle or tendon sprains, etc. Pain is your body's way of saying "stop before you hurt yourself", or if you're already injured or sick, "rest so I can heal!" We come to associate negative feelings with pain because the circumstances in which we experience pain are generally unpleasant.
I'm not asking why I feel pleasure when I do things but why is this feeling I get pleasurable?
I think the answer you are looking for is essentially a tautology. We enjoy pleasurable sensations because "pleasure" is the name we give to the sensations we enjoy. We don't enjoy what we call pain for the converse reason.
I don't think there's an answer here. If you're asking why, in a historical sense, a certain act makes you feel pleasure, you can look at tripplethrendo's answer. If you're asking why, in a biological sense, a certain act makes you feel pleasure, you can buy a biology book or wait for somebody to talk about endorphins or something (I don't know about that stuff).
If you're asking why experiencing pleasure is pleasurable, I think you're at a dead end. The feeling you get when you feel pleasure is pleasurable because that's just what it is. The two are not separable, and it's even a stretch to talk about them as if different things.
Because of the way your body is wired. Certain things are apparently supposed to feel nice, while others are not. I don't know why they're supposed to....perhaps to encourage us to do certain things?
Pleasure is there to reinforce behaviors that were evolutionarily selected for. Pain is there to stop you from doing things which are disadvantageous evolutionarily.
Sounds drab and probably not what you're looking for, but evolution is the ultimate cause or reason for almost everything about everything that is alive.
Exercise also causes pain but it is beneficial. What's your take on that?
We only need exercise because human society has changed such that natural exercise, such as hunting, is no longer necessary. If you were, say, hunting a wooly mammoth, pain/displeasure from running a long time would preserve your energy and possibly help to avoid injury from straining yourself too much, forcing you to use energy more wisely. If you're hungry enough, though, you can push past this discomfort, as long as it's not too severe, and continue hunting the game until you've caught your meal. Assuming, of course, you have enough calories to burn for it to be physically possible.
This episode of RadioLab talks about some of this stuff. Check it out!
We didn't "Exercise" in out evolutionary past. Much in the same way that we have lots of sex now without the babies and all the pleasure. And yummy fatty foods are bad for our health.
Things have changed a lot since then and our physiology hasn't had the time to catch up.
When we push our bodies (exercise) our body lets us know that we shouldn't take it too far or there will be detrimental effects, so in comes the pain to keep us from doing it. Also I'd like to think that most people don't exercise to the point of pain that is comparable to an injury.
Here's a less abstracted way of thinking about it: Pain is an excellent motivator. Knowing that something will hurt will get you in and out of situations without having to think of much else.
And yummy fatty foods are bad for our health.
Just by the way, this is disputed (and pretty thoroughly I might add) in Gary Taubes's Good Calories, Bad Calories.
Visitor from r/Fitness; carry on. :)
What kind of answer are you looking for beyond the neuroscientific one?
Why do I enjoy the feeling I get when I drink a coke or have sex? Why is this feeling deemed by my brain to be pleasurable while pain is deemed to be unsatisfactory? It seems rather arbitrary and I was wondering if the philosophy subreddit could satisfy my curiosity : ).
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Because it's useful.
Do I like it because it feels good, or does it feel good because I like it? Are you kidding me?
I actually think this is a great question, and perhaps a very refined way to explore the meaning of consciousness. Our current understanding of "thinking" and "sentience" is embryonic, but perhaps by phrasing questions in terms of pleasure and pain, we might make progress. I propose the following challenge: "What is the smallest system (e.g. shortest computer program, fewest neurons, ...) one can build which feels pain?" And of course, "What definition of pain are you using?"
you can train yourself to enjoy pain.
I think I understand what you're trying to ask. It's simple enough to say that we enjoy things because they are, from an evolutionary standpoint, useful for survival (easy example: sugar=energy). It's also simple enough to answer that the enjoyment of it is in the form of a chemical release such as endorphins. But what you want to do is take it one step further and ask why these chemicals feel the way they do. And what is "feeling," anyway?
So what you're really asking about is the experience of consciousness, and how and why this undefinable thing should exist. Beyond simply avoiding things that could endanger survival, why should the experience of pain be, well, painful? Many religions would call this thing that's experiencing the pain or pleasure, the soul. It's one of the biggest questions in philosophy, and after reading through my whole comment, I hate to break it to you that neither I nor anyone else has a concrete answer they can back up. I do think this branch of philosophy has a name, but I'm sorry I can't think of the name of it.
You already know what behaviors and things tend to occasion painful and pleasurable phenomena, but since there is nothing in these processes and entities like pleasure or pain, you can only identify them with your experience by causal relation.
Such an explanatory account is no more satisfying than describing experience in terms of evolution, c-fibers, neurons, particles, strings, or anything else. And, since neither pain nor pleasure compels behavior or intentional states by exclusivity, a descriptive or semantic account of phenomena could never be exhaustive. Likewise, no attempt to stack adjectives will allow you to make any more sense of these feelings. Terms like "pleasing" and "displeasing" are meaningful by virtue of the existence of their referents; were they, and every other lexically-distinguishing reference to pain or pleasure banished from the world, pleasure and pain would persist.
Such a state of affairs implies that these mental features are phenomenal primitives and can change only by qualitative extension. They are causally contingent entities, e.g. on ontological primitives and the physical substrate of mentality (a relation made apparent with analgesic medication), but cannot "consist of" any other physical or mental event. Therefore it would make no sense to define pleasure in terms of desire as Bertrand Russell, for example, insisted was the case. This, unfortunately is the end of the explanatory line (although I must mention that I don't necessarily agree with this explanation).
further question. why do we have to trick our bodies into having an orgasm by masturbating (rubbing/stroking)? why can't we just say okay, cum. like we do when we want to move our arms/legs/eyelids/etc.
why can't we simply turn off pain when it is no longer beneficial? "okay brain, I know my leg is broken. I'm at the hospital we are setting it in a cast. can you just stop interpreting those nerve signals for me for now thanks?"
Well we can't really turn off any our systems with an act of will like that. But more importantly, who would turn on signals that pretty much say "you don't want to feel this". The whole idea behind pain is that you want to avoid it, and for that to be credible as a motivator you can't just choose not to have it around.
Natural selection.
In more detail, the sensation of pleasure is deployed when a sub-system of our being wants to reinforce behaviours that led to that sub-system being in a certain state, and the sensation of pain when a sub-system wants to discourage. As tripplethrendo says, those circumstances are determined by natural selection.
What creates the 'feelings'? For example, what makes an orgasm enjoyable?
edit: Now that I think of it, it must be some kind of 'drug' that your body releases. But what makes taking a drug feel good?