Interesting, so I might be in the minority for whom pain is the opposite of not only pleasure, but good, too. (since I can’t think of any case when pain wouldn’t take away from any kind of ‘goodness’) EDIT what are some examples for painful, but not bad?
“The standard definition for pain, as developed by the International Association for the Study of Pain is as follows: “An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience normally associated with tissue damage or described in terms of such damage.”″
I think the key word in the definition is unpleasant. All the examples in the articles you linked,and as far as i read, in the comments, assume the activity is enjoyed despite being unpleasant. However I don’t see what points that such activities aren’t enjoyed precisely because they are, on the whole, pleasant, despite being partly unpleasant.
You might endure a (short-term) unpleasant feeling because it’s a side effect of something you think will also have (longer-term) desirable outcomes/makes you more like the person you want to be (for example, hunger when you’re on a weight-loss diet). This is the reverse of wireheading (by which term I’m including present-day non-fictional implementations of the idea, such as heroin), which gives pleasant feelings but doesn’t make you more like the person you want to be. (The fact that pleasurable things can have longer-term bad outcomes and painful things can have longer-term good outcomes is the very root of akrasia, isn’t it?)
Interesting, so I might be in the minority for whom pain is the opposite of not only pleasure, but good, too. (since I can’t think of any case when pain wouldn’t take away from any kind of ‘goodness’) EDIT what are some examples for painful, but not bad?
Eating spicy food?
“The standard definition for pain, as developed by the International Association for the Study of Pain is as follows: “An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience normally associated with tissue damage or described in terms of such damage.”″
I think the key word in the definition is unpleasant. All the examples in the articles you linked,and as far as i read, in the comments, assume the activity is enjoyed despite being unpleasant. However I don’t see what points that such activities aren’t enjoyed precisely because they are, on the whole, pleasant, despite being partly unpleasant.
You might endure a (short-term) unpleasant feeling because it’s a side effect of something you think will also have (longer-term) desirable outcomes/makes you more like the person you want to be (for example, hunger when you’re on a weight-loss diet). This is the reverse of wireheading (by which term I’m including present-day non-fictional implementations of the idea, such as heroin), which gives pleasant feelings but doesn’t make you more like the person you want to be. (The fact that pleasurable things can have longer-term bad outcomes and painful things can have longer-term good outcomes is the very root of akrasia, isn’t it?)