Because I stole the word “attachment” from them, yes. But really, it’s a matter of affective asynchrony—i.e., the ability to have mixed feelings.
Human motivational emotions aren’t a single scale, where disutility is subtracted from utility to yield an output value. Instead, they’re points on a plane, where utility and disutility are axes, and certain co-ordinates are unreachable.
So, it’s possible to have things whose absence causes pain, but whose presence doesn’t cause any pleasure (aka “satisficers”), and things whose presence creates pleasure, but whose absence doesn’t cause any pain. (Among other possible combinations.)
The “axes” for these things seem relatively independently programmable—that is, you can usually remove an “attachment” (conditioned displeasure) without affecting the “desire”. (I’ve never tried the reverse.)
(Also, this is still a bit of a simplification, since “desire” is kind of vague—we have things we feel driven to do, but which don’t provide us any pleasure, and things which provide us pleasure, but which we don’t feel driven to do. Human beings are seriously f’d up in the head. ;-) )
Because I stole the word “attachment” from them, yes. But really, it’s a matter of affective asynchrony—i.e., the ability to have mixed feelings.
Human motivational emotions aren’t a single scale, where disutility is subtracted from utility to yield an output value. Instead, they’re points on a plane, where utility and disutility are axes, and certain co-ordinates are unreachable.
So, it’s possible to have things whose absence causes pain, but whose presence doesn’t cause any pleasure (aka “satisficers”), and things whose presence creates pleasure, but whose absence doesn’t cause any pain. (Among other possible combinations.)
The “axes” for these things seem relatively independently programmable—that is, you can usually remove an “attachment” (conditioned displeasure) without affecting the “desire”. (I’ve never tried the reverse.)
(Also, this is still a bit of a simplification, since “desire” is kind of vague—we have things we feel driven to do, but which don’t provide us any pleasure, and things which provide us pleasure, but which we don’t feel driven to do. Human beings are seriously f’d up in the head. ;-) )