pjeby comments on Raising the Sanity Waterline - Less Wrong

112 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 March 2009 04:28AM

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Comment author: pjeby 13 March 2009 03:24:37AM 2 points [-]

I don't see how they're even remotely unorthodox. Most of what I said is verifiable from your own personal experience.... unless you're claiming that if having sex gives you pleasure, then you're in constant pain when you're not having sex!

However, if you must have the blessings of an authority (which I believe is what "orthodox" means), perhaps you'll find these excerpts of interest:

In addition to behavioral data, evidence from the neurosciences is increasingly in accord with the partial independence of positive and negative evaluative mechanisms or systems (Berntson, Boysen & Cacioppo, in press; Gray, 1987, 1991). The notion dates back at least to the experimental studies of Olds (1958: Olds & Milner, 1954), who spearheaded a literature identifying separate neural mechanisms to be related to the subjective states of pleasure and pain.

...

In an intriguing study that bears on functional rather than stochastic independence, Goldstein and Strube (in press) demonstrated the separability of positive and negative affect within a specific situation and time and the uncoupled activation of positive and negative processes after success and failure feedback, respectively.

The paper containing these two excerpts (from the 1994 APA Bulletin), is probably worth reading in more detail; you can find a copy here.

So, at least in what might be loosely considered "my" field, nothing I said in the post you're referencing is exactly what I'd call "unorthodox".