I think we're still not seeing eye-to-eye on the possibility that valence, i.e., whatever pattern within conscious systems innately feels good, can be described crisply.

If it's clear a priori that it can't, then yes, this whole question is necessarily confused. But I see no argument to that effect, just an assertion. From your perspective, my question takes the form: "what's the thing that all dogs have in common?"- and you're trying to tell me it's misguided to look for some platonic 'essence of dogness'. Concepts don't work like that. I do get that, and I agree that most concepts are like that. But from my perspective, your assertion sounds like, "all concepts pertaining to this topic are necessarily vague, so it's no use trying to even hypothesize that a crisp mathematical relationship could exist." I.e., you're assuming your conclusion. Now, we can point to other contexts where rather crisp mathematical models do exist: electromagnetism, for instance. How do you know the concept of valence is more like 'dogness' than electromagnetism?

Ultimately, the details, or mathematics, behind any 'universal' or 'rigorous' theory of valence would depend on having a well-supported, formal theory of consciousness to start from. It's no use talking about patterns within conscious systems when we don't have a clear idea of what constitutes a conscious system. A quantitative approach to valence needs a clear ontology, which we don't have yet (Tononi's IIT is a good start, but hardly a final answer). But let's not mistake the difficulty in answering these questions with them being inherently unanswerable.

We can imagine someone making similar critiques a few centuries ago regarding whether electromagnetism was a sharply-defined concept, or whether understanding it matters. It turned out electromagnetism was a relatively sharply-defined concept: there was something to get, and getting it did matter. I suspect a similar relationship holds with valence in conscious systems. I'm not sure it does, but I think it's more reasonable to accept the possibility than not at this point.

Right- good questions.

First, I think getting a rigorous answer to this 'mystery of pain and pleasure' is contingent upon having a good theory of consciousness. It's really hard to say anything about which patterns in conscious systems lead to pleasure without a clear definition of what our basic ontology is.

Second, I've been calling this "The Important Problem of Consciousness", a riff off Chalmers' distinction between the Easy and Hard problems. I.e., if someone switched my red and green qualia in some fundamental sense it wouldn't matter; if someone switched pain and pleasure, it would.

Third, it seems to me that patternist accounts of consciousness can answer some of your questions, to some degree, just by ruling out consciousness (things can only experience suffering insofar as they're conscious). How to rank each of your examples in severity, however, is... very difficult.

Right. It might be a little bit more correct to speak of 'temporal arrangements of arrangements of particles', for which 'processes' is a much less awkward shorthand.

But saying "pleasure is a neurological process" seems consistent with saying "it all boils down to physical stuff- e.g., particles, eventually", and doesn't seem to necessarily imply that "you can't find a 'pleasure pattern' that's fully generalized. The information is always contextual."

Good is a complex concept, not an irreducible basic constituent of the universe. It's deeply rooted in our human stuff like metabolism (food is good), reproduction (sex is good), social environment (having allies is good) etc

It seems like you're making two very distinct assertions here: first, that valence is not a 'natural kind', that it doesn't 'carve reality at the joints', and is impossible to form a crisp, physical definition of; and second, that valence is highly connected to drives that have been evolutionarily advantageous to have. The second is clearly correct; the first just seems to be an assertion (one that I understand, and I think reasonable people can hold at this point, but that I disagree with).

I see the argument, but I'll note that your comments seem to run contrary to the literature on this: see, e.g., Berridge on "Dissecting components of reward: ‘liking’, ‘wanting’, and learning", as summed up by Luke in The Neuroscience of Pleasure. In short, behavior, memory, and enjoyment ('seeking', 'learning', and 'liking' in the literature) all seem to be fairly distinct systems in the brain. If we consider a being with a substantially different cognitive architecture, whether through divergent evolution or design, it seems problematic to view behavior as the gold standard of whether it's experiencing pleasure or suffering. At this point it may be the most practical approach, but it's inherently imperfect.

My strong belief is that although there is substantial plasticity in how we interpret experiences as positive or negative, this plasticity isn't limitless. Some things will always feel painful; others will always feel pleasurable, given a not-too-highly-modified human brain. But really, I think this line of thinking is a red herring: it's not about the stimulus, it's about what's happening inside the brain, and any crisp/rigorous/universal principles will be found there.

Is valence a 'natural kind'? Does it 'carve reality at the joints'? Intuitions on this differ (here's a neat article about the lack of consensus about emotions). I don't think anger, or excitement, or grief carve reality at the joints- I think they're pretty idiosyncratic to the human emotional-cognitive architecture. But if anything about our emotions is fundamental/universal, I think it'd have to be their valence.

Surely neurological processes are "arrangements of particles" too, though.

I think your question gets to the heart of the matter- is there a general principle to be found with regard to which patterns within conscious systems innately feel good, or isn't there? It would seem very surprising to me if there wasn't.

I had posted the original in 2013, and did a major revision today, before promoting it (leaving the structure of the questions intact, to preserve previous discussion referents).

I hope I haven't committed any faux pas in doing this.

Thank you- that paper is extremely relevant and I appreciate the link.

To reiterate, mostly for my own benefit: As Tegmark says- whether we're talking about a foundation to ethics, or a "final goal", or we simply want to not be confused about what's worth wanting, we need to figure out what makes one brain-state innately preferable to another, and ultimately this boils down to arrangements of particles. But what makes one arrangement of particles superior to another? (This is not to give credence to moral relativism- I do believe this has a crisp answer).

On the first point-- what you say is clearly right, but is also consistent with the notion that there are certain mathematical commonalities which hold across the various 'flavors' of pleasure, and different mathematical commonalities in pain states.

Squashing the richness of human emotion into a continuum of positive and negative valence sounds like a horribly lossy transform, but I'm okay with that in this context. I expect that experiences at the 'pleasure' end of the continuum will have important commonalities 'under the hood' with others at that same end. And those commonalities will vanish, and very possibly invert, when we look at the 'agony' end.

On the second point, the evidence points to physical and emotional pain sharing many of the same circuits, and indeed, drugs which reduce physical pain also reduce emotional pain. On the other hand, as you might expect, there are some differences in the precise circuitry each type of pain activates. But by and large, the differences are subtle.