There are 3 pleasure states: negative (hopelessness), neutral (anhedonia), and positive (feeling pleasure). The negative state of pleasure (depression), depression is also a natural response by evolution to discourage our survival aside from it being something such as a chemical imbalance or the result of a brain abnormality. It warns us when something is going wrong in our lives which is the reason why we become depressed when something bad happens in our lives such as the loss of a loved one, etc. When we are encouraged for survival, that would be defined as having genuine good perceptions in life such as to want to live and make the best of our lives, help others, etc. This encouragement can only be defined through our pleasure since it is only our feelings that genuinely encourage and discourage our survival. They are the only things that genuinely make us perceive our lives as either being good and worth living or as bad and not worth living at all. But if you are in a state of anhedonia (absence of pleasure), then this should also tell you that your life is not worth living at all either since how we normally function as human beings would be through relying on our perception of good to make our lives good and worth living. That neutral perception should then send a depressive signal to your brain and then make you and your life bad and of truly even less worth now. As I said before, in a state of anhedonia, our good and bad perceptions are not genuine and is just our mind’s irrational way of fooling ourselves into thinking that we are having genuine good and bad perceptions without having any pleasure or suffering in our lives at the moment.
I said that our encouragement for survival in life can only be defined by having genuine good perceptions. Therefore, since depression discourages our survival, then this means that we cannot genuinely perceive us and our lives as being good and worth living while in a state of significant depression since depression shuts down our good perceptions. Therefore, depression shuts down our good perceptions in a negative sense in that we would have bad perceptions, anhedonia simply neutralizes our perceptions in which we neither genuinely perceive our lives as being good or bad without pleasure and suffering, and pleasure is what defines our genuine good perceptions in life.
When a person is depressed, he/she might say to his/herself in a depressive mood (tonality) that his/her life is still good and worth living. He/she might very well continue on to pursue his/her dreams and goals in life even while still feeling depressed. But those good perceptions are all decoys without our pleasure as I’ve said before. The person’s depression has shut down his/her genuine good perceptions in life. But he/she is now doing nothing more than just simply saying to his/herself that his/her life is still good and worth living anyway and just forcing his/herself to live life anyway. So now this person is just simply being fooled by words and phrases alone when there is no genuine good perception at all from those words and phrases while he/she is in a state of depression.
On one side of the spectrum you have people who are so severely depressed that they don’t want to do anything who find no good value in their lives. They can hardly function and can hardly want to do things in their lives at all. These types of people are so severe that they can never bring themselves to make the best of their lives and such. These types of people need electric shock treatment. But on the other side of the spectrum you have people who are so happy and excited in life that they are doing all sorts of great things in life. So based on that, you can clearly see how our level of pleasure defines our level of good perception in life. But even if it were somehow a proven fact that you and your life are truly good even in a state of depression/anhedonia, then what good is that going to do for you? What is the use of you and your life being good if you are not even allowed to genuinely perceive it as being good?
Now our perceptions do define how we feel. But it’s our feelings that make those said perceptions genuinely good or bad only from the perspective of those feelings alone and not from the perspective of those perceptions (thoughts) alone which are all neutral in of themselves as I’ve said before. So it’s just how we feel independent of our thoughts that genuinely makes us and our lives good or bad. I also realize that there is one other emotion which would be empathy. There are also 3 states of empathy as well: negative (in which you feel bad such as you feeling sorry for hurting someone else), neutral (no empathy in which one might also just simply help others out anyway through just thoughts and such alone), and positive (which would be a feeling of pleasure in which you feel good for helping someone else). Here again, the negative state defines us and our lives as being bad and genuinely defines our perceptions as bad, the neutral defines us and our lives as being neither good or bad and our perceptions as being neither good or bad without our pleasure, and the positive state is what genuinely defines us and our lives as being genuinely good and defines our perceptions as being genuinely good.
In conclusion, I am making these arguments to try and help find better cures and treatments for anhedonia and depression. If people would realize that pleasure and suffering are the only true good and bad things in life, then they would be much more inclined to find better treatments and a cure. Too many people are just accepting of suffering due to them thinking that they are still good people even with much suffering and/or an absence of pleasure in their lives. But I wish to change this mindset so that people would then truly realize once and for all the pleasure and suffering really are the only true good and bad things in life. Not only am I trying to find better treatments and cures for depression and anhedonia, but also for suffering in general. My hedonistic values would also encourage others to find better treatments and cures for suffering in general as well. This would also even include mortality since living in an eternal blissful life of no suffering is the one and only greatest life there is and is the one and only thing that would make you the greatest person.
I am going to state something extremely important here. It is something truly amazing. When I had this depression and anhedonia (absence of pleasure), this lead me to a personal belief (conclusion) that pleasure is the only truly good thing in life, suffering is the only truly bad thing in life, while everything else in life is neutral (neither truly good or bad). I went online and typed in the question “Is pleasure the only good thing in life?” and I have found an established belief system that basically matches what I just said word for word. This belief is known as Psychological Hedonism. I am now going to give you the link (url) to this website:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hedonism/
Now that you’ve read it, I find it too much of a coincidence that an intelligent person such as myself has come up with a personal conclusion and that there also so happens to be a belief supported by science that says the exact same things I’m saying. Therefore, pleasure really must be the only truly good thing in life then and suffering must be the only truly bad thing in life.
I can honestly say here that this is something truly tragic though because this would mean that we would have every right to treat suffering people like shit since they are bad people since they feel bad. If we suffer, then we should treat ourselves like shit since we are bad people who deserve to be thrown and tossed away like metal scraps. It would also mean that we should bow down before those types of people who derive pleasure from making our lives shit since they are the greater people since they have pleasure in their lives.
Now that you've read it, I find it too much of a coincidence that an intelligent person such as myself has come up with a personal conclusion and that there also so happens to be a belief supported by science that says the exact same things I'm saying. Therefore, pleasure really must be the only truly good thing in life then and suffering must be the only truly bad thing in life.Did you read it? Your coincidence is evidence of nothing. What you have found is a name for something that you became aware of through your experience of a unique mental state and through general cultural acquisition that you are unaware of. We're all unaware of what we acquire through culture so that is not an insult. We can study culture and become aware and I'm glad you found this article because it is a thorough overview of something important to you. If you read it, there is no possible way to conclude what you have concluded. Sure, people going back to Plato have thought about hedonism, but Plato compared the ultimate hedonist to an oyster, because they would be immersed in pure pleasure, never reflecting on even the most recent moment of pleasurable experience. But you don't need to read that far. Arguments motivational hedonism begin in section 1.1 which is titled "Arguments for Psychological Hedonism". Seems a bit of paradox, but is standard for Stanford's Encyclopedia, they almost never take a strong pro or con, they present arguments and explain why they well formed or not and present counter arguments. They are not beyond commentary, and will sometimes make rather scathing remarks, although in a very intellectual tone. In this case, I found this paragraph that applies quite well to you:
Rivals would simply re-state the ongoing central issue using neighbouring concepts; for example: ‘however it might be with the narrower concept “motive", the claim that we are always moved by pleasure is false’. Nor would it help motivational hedonists to make a Humpty Dumpty move here (see Carroll: ch. 6): ‘when I use the words “is motivated", said Humpty Dumpty, they mean just what I choose them to mean, namely “is aimed at pleasure"’. Such stipulation does not identify any good reason for anyone to join Humpty Dumpty in his eccentric word usage.
Now that you've read it, I find it too much of a coincidence that an intelligent person such as myself has come up with a personal conclusion and that there also so happens to be a belief supported by science that says the exact same things I'm saying. Therefore, pleasure really must be the only truly good thing in life then and suffering must be the only truly bad thing in life.Did you read it? Your coincidence is evidence of nothing. What you have found is a name for something that you became aware of through your experience of a unique mental state and through general cultural acquisition that you are unaware of. We're all unaware of what we acquire through culture so that is not an insult. We can study culture and become aware and I'm glad you found this article because it is a thorough overview of something important to you. If you read it, there is no possible way to conclude what you have concluded. Sure, people going back to Plato have thought about hedonism, but Plato compared the ultimate hedonist to an oyster, because they would be immersed in pure pleasure, never reflecting on even the most recent moment of pleasurable experience. But you don't need to read that far. Arguments motivational hedonism begin in section 1.1 which is titled "Arguments for Psychological Hedonism". Seems a bit of paradox, but is standard for Stanford's Encyclopedia, they almost never take a strong pro or con, they present arguments and explain why they well formed or not and present counter arguments. They are not beyond commentary, and will sometimes make rather scathing remarks, although in a very intellectual tone. In this case, I found this paragraph that applies quite well to you:
Rivals would simply re-state the ongoing central issue using neighbouring concepts; for example: ‘however it might be with the narrower concept “motive", the claim that we are always moved by pleasure is false’. Nor would it help motivational hedonists to make a Humpty Dumpty move here (see Carroll: ch. 6): ‘when I use the words “is motivated", said Humpty Dumpty, they mean just what I choose them to mean, namely “is aimed at pleasure"’. Such stipulation does not identify any good reason for anyone to join Humpty Dumpty in his eccentric word usage.But what I am saying is that pleasure is a feeling version of good that is independent of our thoughts and moral values. Our thoughts, moral values, including everything else in life can never define pleasure as being bad or neutral. This is because everything else in life is a separate version of good and bad. This version is a neutral (fake) version of good and bad. Therefore, it doesn't matter if seeking pleasure caused harm to you and/or others. The pleasure would still be always good in of itself since it is a feeling version of good while the suffering in of itself would be bad and nothing more since it is a feeling version of bad. The thoughts, actions, situations, etc. only matter in a neutral sense since they are all neutral things while the feelings of pleasure and suffering in of themselves are the only things that truly matter. Our pleasure and suffering are the only things that genuinely make us and our lives good or bad. If we feel good about a certain thought, then that makes that thought good regardless of the harm it could cause. Same thing for suffering making us, our lives, and our thoughts bad. Until the thought you feel good about brings you suffering and until the thought that you feel bad about brings you pleasure, those thoughts will remain good and bad until your feelings change and switch their good and bad value around. I said that our thoughts cannot define our pleasure and suffering. Therefore, you might then ask how does our pleasure and suffering define our thoughts as being truly good or bad then? The answer to that would be that I think you can actually feel from the thoughts providing you have feelings of pleasure and suffering. Therefore, the thoughts themselves would of actually become the feelings of pleasure and suffering. So the thoughts would be the actual feelings of pleasure and suffering themselves. They would no longer be the neutral moral version of those thoughts. But here again, if you do not have feelings of pleasure (such as through anhedonia) and if you were to have no feelings of suffering for that matter either, then those thoughts would all be neutral then.
But what I am saying....Really, you should read some Lewis Carroll. You just provided an example of you doing your Humpty Dumpty impersonation.
I would say that evolution does reward important drivers of evolution with pleasure, but pleasure is not what drives evolution.
If pleasure is a end goal of evolution, explain why a female Preying Mantis chews off the head of a male during procreation. Maybe I’m reaching, but if you get your head bitten off and eaten during reproduction, that doesn’t sound like pleasure.
Also, salmon go through an exhausting, dangerous and fatal ordeal of migrating back to their spawning grounds in order to reproduce. Success means not dying from predators or exhaustion, and instead dying after fertilizing eggs. Not seeing the pleasure angle there.
Our thoughts including everything else in life can never define our feelings of pleasure as being bad or neutral. It would be no different than the fact that one type of smell cannot define another type of smell. In this case, one type of smell (our thoughts including everything else in life) cannot define another smell (which would be our feelings of pleasure) since they are different smells with different properties and characteristics. Therefore, pleasure is a version of good that is always good in of itself no matter what since it always feels good. This version of good cannot be defined otherwise through our thoughts, moral values, including everything else in life.But what I am saying....Really, you should read some Lewis Carroll. You just provided an example of you doing your Humpty Dumpty impersonation.
Therefore, pleasure is a version of good that is always good in of itself no matter what since it always feels good. This version of good cannot be defined otherwise through our thoughts, moral values, including everything else in life.You're a hopeless case Mozart. The pain in your life is due more to blocking out everyone around you, not your anhedonia. If you treat people around you anything like you treat people on discussion forums, I don't blame them for ignoring you. Fine, I'll concede for the moment that pleasure is good, but that's the only thing you have given evidence for. It is not the only good. Exercise is good because I feel the pleasure of a healthy body afterward. Exercise is not always pleasurable while I'm doing it.
Therefore, pleasure is a version of good that is always good in of itself no matter what since it always feels good. This version of good cannot be defined otherwise through our thoughts, moral values, including everything else in life.You're a hopeless case Mozart. The pain in your life is due more to blocking out everyone around you, not your anhedonia. If you treat people around you anything like you treat people on discussion forums, I don't blame them for ignoring you. Fine, I'll concede for the moment that pleasure is good, but that's the only thing you have given evidence for. It is not the only good. Exercise is good because I feel the pleasure of a healthy body afterward. Exercise is not always pleasurable while I'm doing it. IMO, the use of the word "pleasure" is inappropriate. It would suggest an emotional sentience. Perhaps a more "neutral" word, such as "comfort" (compatibility) would be more objective in concept. Even inanimate objects can find comfort with each other. H2O is but one example, but I doubt the molecules find pleasure in this mutually compatible interaction. Of course, in a scientific sense, these functions (potentials) are defined as: unallowable, conditionally allowable, and allowable physical expressions.. From a moral perspective there is no distinction between any of these universal functions, they are all required for order, .... universal potentials.
I receive great pleasure in putting certain posters on my “ignore” list. It must be an evolutionary thing.
Lois
I receive great pleasure in putting certain posters on my “ignore" listWhat a coincidence! I used the ignore on the author of this thread and only tried the "View" just now because I saw that you posted something. I too define pleasure as hitting the ignore button on authors of drivel.