Would you propose that a mind lacking in motivation couldn’t feel blissfully happy?
Here we’re reaching the borders of my ability to be confident about my replies, but the two answers which occur to me are:
1) It’s not positive reinforcement unless feeling it makes you experience at least some preference to do it again—otherwise in what sense are the neural networks getting their plus? Heroin may not induce desire while you’re on it, but the thought of the bliss induces desire to take heroin again, once you’re off the heroin.
2) The superBuddhist no longer capable of experiencing desire or choice, even desire or choice over which thoughts to think, also becomes incapable of experiencing happiness (perhaps its neural networks aren’t even being reinforced to make certain thoughts more likely to be repeated). However, you, who are still capable of desire and who still have positively reinforcing thoughts, might be tricked into considering the superBuddhist’s experience to be analogous to your own happiness and therefore acquire a desire to be a superBuddhist as a result of imagining one—mostly on account of having been told that it was representing a similar quale on account of representing a similar internal code for an experience, without realizing that the rest of the superBuddhist’s mind now lacks the context your own mind brings to interpreting that internal coding into pleasurable positive reinforcement that would make you desire to repeat that experiential state.
Here we’re reaching the borders of my ability to be confident about my replies, but the two answers which occur to me are:
1) It’s not positive reinforcement unless feeling it makes you experience at least some preference to do it again—otherwise in what sense are the neural networks getting their plus? Heroin may not induce desire while you’re on it, but the thought of the bliss induces desire to take heroin again, once you’re off the heroin.
2) The superBuddhist no longer capable of experiencing desire or choice, even desire or choice over which thoughts to think, also becomes incapable of experiencing happiness (perhaps its neural networks aren’t even being reinforced to make certain thoughts more likely to be repeated). However, you, who are still capable of desire and who still have positively reinforcing thoughts, might be tricked into considering the superBuddhist’s experience to be analogous to your own happiness and therefore acquire a desire to be a superBuddhist as a result of imagining one—mostly on account of having been told that it was representing a similar quale on account of representing a similar internal code for an experience, without realizing that the rest of the superBuddhist’s mind now lacks the context your own mind brings to interpreting that internal coding into pleasurable positive reinforcement that would make you desire to repeat that experiential state.