Arthur Schopenhauer provided the best definition I’ve ever seen of an animal: something that has a representation. All animals (including the self-named Homo sapiens) have at least one sense, live in time and space, and perhaps most importantly of all, feel what may be crudely called “pleasure and pain”.
I would like to add a complementary definition of an animal: A pleasure-pain optimisation machine. (That is, pleasure is to maximised and pain minimised.) This is the source of ALL motivation in animals. This include the famous idea in philosophy that selflessness is merely a variety of selfishness, and that we’re all essentially out for ourselves. (It’s worth adding that I’m only talking about decisions, not things we do instinctively or out of habit or training.)
I now come to a Buddist-esque point. A mixture of pleasure and pain (P&P) is at the heart of the animal condition, so all animals, as they grow up, calibrate themselves to their surrounding such that they get a balance of the two. Everyone has a similar mixture of highs and lows, overall and on average.
An important thing to add here is that situations can change (for better or worse) giving people unusually good or bad periods of time. The key thing is that they gradually re-calibrate, leading them back to the old balance in the fullness of time. It’s worth noting that a sure way to make someone happy is to put them through hell for a while, and then give them a good time!
There can be no escape EVER, in principle, from this P&P balance, this Yin and Yang. The removal of what’s currently “bad” only makes room for new bad things, which were probably only “average” before. The concepts of Heaven and Hell are as naive as they are impossible. Anyone who thinks they can have Yin (or Yang) forever is completely misguided.
I have set out my current thinking about the animal condition. I’m aware that this isn’t new, and that many other people including the ancients have all but said it, but I wanted to say it anyway
Does anyone have anything they’d like to add? Does anyone disagree with any of my main points?
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There’s an interesting follow up post I’m gonna make, which might not go down too well with some people! Watch this space.
Though I agree with the gist of it, it is not entirely true. Leading science shows that the common sense is flawed, that certain people produce more or less of the chemicals that cause pleasure and pain. Certain people are geared to be happier or sadder than the norm.
Besides, if it were as you paint it, everyone would be equally happy during comparable downturns or upturns in life. There wouldn’t be any hppy-go-lucky people, which clearly there are.
Moreover, chronic pain due to injury, nerve problems, what have you, would subside in time, but it does not. It would have to be held that such pain is constantly intensifying in order to explain how the perception of it to remains constant.
Chemicals that cause pleasure and pain? I’m not sure about that… I agree though that there are happy people and miserable people, and that the issue of what the PP balance is is very tricky. I think the issue is too clouded by recalibration to be certain about it.
If someone were to have oscillations between being normal and having some kind of ache, then I’d say that the normal times would be particularly pleasurable for them. The pain would remain painful in this complementary role. If a man literally in permeanent pain were to feel it for his whole life, then I’d be stumped. In this case, he should get used to it. Though maybe our timescales are too short for extreme P&P scenarios…
Given that whatever the conditions we live in, we have the same pleasure/pain balance; the same highs-to-lows ratio (roughly speaking); the same life cycle, surely there’s no imperative to do aid work? When we (in the west) look at poor countries, we assess them according to our gauges, which are calibrated to our world. And reflect that if we lived there, we’d hate it. But to them, it’s “the norm”, and even though moving them here (say) would be improvement, it’s the same as the notion of giving someone in the west ten million pounds – a nice, but non-essential, bonus.
So the message is: sod charity, sod international aid work, focus on your own life.
This isn’t to say that it’s a bad idea. If you like the idea of making someone happy, go ahead and do it, but don’t try to play the guilt game with people like me. I didn’t cause all these problems, remember.
yes, i don’t agree with this, although the pain/pleasure issue is so complex that it’s hard even to discuss. first, it may be that neither feelings of pain nor those of pleasure last forever and are always (at some point) superseded by the other; and it may also be that animals are in fact happiest when they have a mix of pleasure and pain in their lives. but it is not the case that animals of any sort actually try to be in pain - those that seem to do so (e.g. sado-masochists, self-harmers) eventually have as their aim the pleasure gained from the pain caused to themselves. animals always try to do what will give them pleasure.
second, it may be that we adjust our conceptions of pleasure and pain according to the situation we are in (a man held in a torture chamber may view the experience of simply not being in intense pain for a few minutes as the greatest feeling of pleasure, although you or me would not view it in the same way) - if so, then this is simply a fact about our psychology. but this does not mean that some are not actually worse off than others in materialistic terms. the man in the torture chamber, although he is experiencing a mixture of pleasure and pain, is in a dire situation. a person does not have to be experiencing continual pain to be in an awful situation.
thirdly, the fact that people living in third-world countries accept their situation as “the norm” does not mean that they would not prefer to be in a more privileged situation - it just means they have got used to it and can’t see a way out. i am sure that, if you moved a starving african family to the west and gave them a load of cash (and equipped them with the skills to survive well) they would thank you for more than simply giving them a “nice, but non-essential bonus”.
yours is an interesting idea, though, and one i’ve pondered on myself…
C.S.,
Google endorphins and Candace Pert. Enlightening material. Representations? Nonsense! Animals evoke meaning from experience. Those with brains use symbols for this purpose. Nothing is represented, except in illusions and abstractions, which are eventually sloughed off in the necessities of adaptation. The Freudian, pleasure/pain concept does not include altruism. Schopenhauer is bleak, negative crap.
Yes, the particulars are very complex, but the idea of a balance between the two is simple IMO. It probably is true that animals are happiest when they have bouts of “good, solid pain” to make the good times better.
Naturally. The persuit of pleasure (whatever the form) is the basis of motivation.
It’s not psychology, it’s experience. A man who lived all his life in a torture chamber would probably be “okay” with it. I myself find what I’ve just typed hard to believe, but that’s coz I’ve lived a “better” life than his, and I know that the issue is one of absolute and not relative circumstances.
I agree that they’d prefer it. But I think my point stands.
Thanks I’m pleased to hear you’ve had similar thoughts yourself.
Ierrellus: I’ll deal with one of your later points first. You said: “The Freudian, pleasure/pain concept does not include altruism.” Are you saying that selflessness is not rooted in self-centred pleasure seeking? If yes, I’ve some examples of how I think it is.
Re the other stuff, are you alluding to your “Rockness Monster” theory? I never really got to grips with that…
C.S.,
Nope. Nothing of Rockness Monster here, except as a continuation of biological principles I’ve espoused in all threads. Even Dawkins had a hard time with altruism (See “The Selfish Gene”.) I’m interested in seeing how you can do better.
Google endorphins and Candice Pert!
Pain and pleasure is like black and white and oversimplification to a degree of distortion.
Yin and Yang is not even close because it has no preference.
Examples for Y&Y would be sleep and awake or night and day, describing balance of seemingly opposites with no stigma attached.
Reducing humans to the level of P&P would make them less than animals.
If you accept evolution you understand that Prosperity and Poverty would fit much better, if you don’t then why bother.
I’m using Y&Y in a particular sense here. I don’t know much about Buddhism, so maybe I’m misusing the concept…
It puts on a par with animals, which we are. What’s prosperity and Poverty? Sounds like something from the Maslow hierarchy (which is a good approximation IMO).
C.S.,
To give credit to you where credit is due–
“Are these things good for any other reason except that they end in pleasure, and get rid of and avert pain? Are you looking to any other standard but pleasure and pain when you call them good?” Plato in “Protagoras”.
Freud swallowed this worm whole and it continues to infect our judgments about right and wrong. I agree with ravencry4all. To get beyond Platonic absolutes, one must understand that polarities are a matter of putting things in opposition that do not necessarily oppose.
Thinking about it, I think the PP-balance stuff would break down in the case of the man in the torture chamber. The reason being that in order to have torture/non-torture as the norm (as opposed to a horrifically bad thing) the extent of the torture would have to be so bad as to basically destroy the man’s body. Furthermore, it would have to have been going on since infancy, so they probably wouldn’t make pre-school…
The position stands for less severe lifestyles though.
Interesting self indulgence.
It would not stand in any case.
Man would go through pain to build muscles and look strong, women would go through pain to look beautiful.
Freud’s idea of everything sexual is closer to reality then your PP.
Even the simplicity of ‘no pain no gain’ makes more sense.
The pleasure of a glass of wine can turn you into an alcoholic but blisters can get you to the top of a mountain to feel like a conquerer.
We are alive ergo we can feel plain and pleasure and we consider them when making decisions but they do not rule our lives.
I can see the argument you are trying to make here, that consciousness of “pain” is only possible by comparison to “less pain.” This might be analogous to when I had to get glasses in high school; I didn’t even know I had a vision problem until the optometrist diagnosed me, so I was not conscious of the “pain” I was in until I experienced the “pleasure” of having better eyesight with glasses.
In order for you position to stand, we have to use extremely loose definitions of “pain” and “pleasure,” or at least apply them in seemingly insignificant scenarios. I think more situations are comparable to the torture chamber man, who would certainly be conscious of his own bodily pain regardless of his exposure to the outside (pain-free) world.
Then again, this is my first post, and I could be grossly misinterpreting your argument like the n00b that I am.
Welcome to the board. On the contrary, it’s a good post, and the bit about loose definitions of P&P is something I agree with, and is in fact about to used by me in my reply to the post above yours.
I’m using “pleasure” and “pain” in a very general way, which includes mental as well as physical feelings. Here are my responses to these two examples.
Man sees two options: be weedy, or be muscular. The idea of being weedy “hurts” him more than the effort of bodybuilding would, so he goes for pain-minimisation and “hits the gym”.
Woman sees two options: be (relatively) ugly, or be pretty. The idea of being ugly hurts more than the boredom & pain of various cosmetic processes, so she too goes for pain minimisation.
I don’t know much about Freud, but remember reading that he’s been discredited. And aren’t his ideas rooted in his own childhood experiences?
Pain can lead to gain, as I’ve shown. If someone thinks that there’s more pleasure to be had in a glass or two of wine that there is pain in any headaches or hangover afterwards, then they’ll drink them.
The are at the base of our decisions. Any elective decision that a man makes that seems to be bad for him is always either a mistake or actually good for him. For example, he might turn down an offer of sex, which even though he would’ve loved it, he knows his guilt would’ve racked him terribly, particularly wrt to his wife.
I’ve always said that P&P cuts across the whole spectrum of shades of grey. Experiences range from terrible to a bit annoying to fairly good to wonderful.
Now that I’ve made this clear, would like to have a better go at showing how my argument “fails”? And how about replying in a bit more detail?
You won’t get one from me, for the simple reason that I don’t give a flying fuck about President Bush or the current War in Iraq. But I’m sure that the people involved are all motivated at bottom by P&P as set out by me.
