Sometimes cartoons just say it all.
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2010/07/amusing-ourselves-to-death/
I agree, great link. The bull is led not by a ring through the nose but by a ring through the… 
Lol. That certainly makes for quite a conceptual symbiont.
Maybe so. But which is stronger…? Pleasure or pain…? Dat’s tricky.
I would say that pain is stronger, but pleasure reaches more people.
I dunno, I still haven’t manged to give up smoking.
Just another addiction… reaching the pleasure center.
Another interesting question, actually two:
Which came first…? Life’s ability to feel pain, or pleasure…?
And, why do we need both anyway…?
For example - anyone who’s been ill, and in pain will know that upon recovery, or alleviation, the absense of pain is akin to pleasure. Why is that not enough…?
Pleasure came first.
Pain came second as a measure in place to preserve the fruits of our pleasures.
Looks as though sociology and psychology are merging here. Good questions.
I bet the people who study torture and the psychological study behind it know the answers. Raise the pain threshold and lower the pleasure expectancy, and you can get people to tolerate anything, I expect.
why?
I think we got what they both feared.
Because.
My impression is that positive taxes tend to be less derived than negative taxes, so if we want to consider positive taxis as a precursor to “pleasure” and negative taxis as a precursor to “pain”, then it would seem that pleasure does come first.
Why both? Because we have conflicting desires. Any creature with well developed eyes is going to display a positive phototaxis. Heck, you don’t even need well-developed eyes, or eyes at all, plants display an incredibly powerful phototaxis. That is all well-and-good, but when the light we are running towards is fire, absent an avoidance of heat we’re just going to burn ourselves to death like, well, a moth drawn to a flame.
Like most things, it is a balancing act. Throw in an aversion to extremes and you’ve got another level of regulation. It is all about fine-tuning.
I see it the other way around. The stimulus is the precursor to the taxic response. Thus, if the stimulus is pleasure, the taxis is attraction; if the stimulus is pain, the taxis would be avoidance. In the view of Kenny’s cartoons, pleasure works better as a stimulant which, used on a constant and varied basis, keeps people attracted in order to distract them.
So, if I apply a gradient of leucine in a weak semi-solid medium with a motile bacteria with a deficiency for leucine, when the bacteria move along the gradient to the areas of higher leucine concentration, it is the leucine (the stimulus) itself which is pleasure and the chemotactic response is a function of that pleasure?
Seems sort of silly to me. It would be like saying that an orange is pleasure and the action of my eating it and the experience of me tasting it is incidental, or more properly, a function of the orange’s existence.
But already with pleasure/pain we are assuming a developed nervous system. Since Tab’s question was, “Which came first?” as well as “why both, why not just one or the other?” which is what I was trying to address.
AH! 
Yes. Of course.
Be cause. The new mantra for the ages. Novus ordo seclorum. So much truth in a single word, and a world in a grain of sand.
I guess it’s possible to think of stimulant and response in terms of chemicals, but I believe that in the larger human and social scheme of things, the issue is one of addiction and distraction through manipulation of the pleasure centers. Why use pain when pleasure, addiction, and distraction work so much better?
It depends on whether the orange works as a pleasure stimulant. It might for some, I couldn’t say. The question is whether that stimulus would work to distract millions of people the way that other stimulants do. The idea is to provoke a response that puts people in a kind of comfort zone where they will want to stay, and then make sure that this is done daily and often.
And I would say that it doesn’t matter in the least, since the stimulus-pleasure response is already at play. The idea is that this kind of manipulation works better than the stimulus-pain response in controlling people. Ironically, I suppose that playing around on the internet and having conversations like these would be included. 
What does any of that have to do with Tab’s question I was answering?
Touchy. Maybe you should look at the cartoons again and then re-read what I actually wrote. Over and out.