sixes_and_sevens comments on There is no such thing as pleasure - Less Wrong

3 Post author: RichardKennaway 07 October 2010 01:49PM

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Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 08 October 2010 09:13:54AM *  0 points [-]

I can certainly group pleasures into consistent and overlapping categories. Most things that give me pleasure:

  • make me feel good about myself
  • make me look good in the eyes of anyone else present
  • involve giving another person or people pleasure
  • involve executing some sort of well-defined skill
  • involve some sort of satisfying pattern-matching
  • involve discovery of something clever

Anything that isn't in this list which I might describe as pleasurable involves some sort of direct physiological pleasure-giving stimulus (orgasm, chocolate, etc.).

I'm pretty sure that based on this criteria I can predict with a fair degree of accuracy whether or not I will find an activity pleasurable; the more criteria an activity meets, the more likely I am to gain pleasure from it, and the greater that pleasure will be. If a coherent concept of pleasure doesn't exist, what am I predicting?