I’m not nyan_sandwich, but here is what I believe to be his point about asking for necessary and sufficient conditions.
Part of your question (maybe not all) appears to be: how should we define “pleasure”?
Aside from precise technical definitions (“an abelian group is a set A together with a function from AxA to A, such that …”), the meaning of a word is hardly ever* accurately given by any necessary-and-sufficient conditions that can be stated explicitly in a reasonable amount of space, because that just isn’t the way human minds work.
We learn the meaning of a word by observing how it’s used. We see, and hear, a word like “pleasure” or “pain” applied to various things, and not to others. What our brains do with this is approximately to consider something an instance of “pleasure” in so far as it resembles other things that are called “pleasure”. There’s no reason why any manageable set of necessary and sufficient conditions should be equivalent to that.
Further, different people are exposed to different sets of uses of the word, and evaluate resemblance in different ways. So your idea of “pleasure” may not be the same as mine, and there’s no reason why there need be any definite answer to the question of whose is better.
Typically, lots of different things will contribute to our considering something sufficiently like other instances of “pleasure” to deserve that name itself. In some particular contexts, some will be more important than others. So if you’re trying to pin down a precise definition for “pleasure”, the features you should concentrate on will depend on what that definition is going to be used for.
How should we define “pleasure”? -- A difficult question. As you mention, it is a cloud of concepts, not a single one. It’s even more difficult because there appears to be precious little driving the standardization of the word—e.g., if I use the word ‘chair’ differently than others, it’s obvious, people will correct me, and our usages will converge. If I use the word ‘pleasure’ differently than others, that won’t be as obvious because it’s a subjective experience, and there’ll be much less convergence toward a common usage.
But I’d say that in practice, these problems tend to work themselves out, at least enough for my purposes. E.g., if I say “think of pure, unadulterated agony” to a room of 10000 people, I think the vast majority would arrive at fairly similar thoughts. Likewise, if I asked 10000 people to think of “pure, unadulterated bliss… the happiest moment in your life”, I think most would arrive at thoughts which share certain attributes, and none (<.01%) would invert answers to these two questions.
I find this “we know it when we see it” definitional approach completely philosophically unsatisfying, but it seems to work well enough for my purposes, which is to find mathematical commonalities across brain-states people identify as ‘pleasurable’, and different mathematical commonalities across brain-states people identify as ‘painful’.
I see what you mean by “the meaning of a word is hardly ever accurately given by any necessary-and-sufficient conditions that can be stated explicitly in a reasonable amount of space, because that just isn’t the way human minds work.” On the other hand, all words are imperfect and we need to talk about this somehow. How about this:
(1) what are the characteristic mathematics of (i.e., found disproportionally in) self-identified pleasurable brain states?
I’m not nyan_sandwich, but here is what I believe to be his point about asking for necessary and sufficient conditions.
Part of your question (maybe not all) appears to be: how should we define “pleasure”?
Aside from precise technical definitions (“an abelian group is a set A together with a function from AxA to A, such that …”), the meaning of a word is hardly ever* accurately given by any necessary-and-sufficient conditions that can be stated explicitly in a reasonable amount of space, because that just isn’t the way human minds work.
We learn the meaning of a word by observing how it’s used. We see, and hear, a word like “pleasure” or “pain” applied to various things, and not to others. What our brains do with this is approximately to consider something an instance of “pleasure” in so far as it resembles other things that are called “pleasure”. There’s no reason why any manageable set of necessary and sufficient conditions should be equivalent to that.
Further, different people are exposed to different sets of uses of the word, and evaluate resemblance in different ways. So your idea of “pleasure” may not be the same as mine, and there’s no reason why there need be any definite answer to the question of whose is better.
Typically, lots of different things will contribute to our considering something sufficiently like other instances of “pleasure” to deserve that name itself. In some particular contexts, some will be more important than others. So if you’re trying to pin down a precise definition for “pleasure”, the features you should concentrate on will depend on what that definition is going to be used for.
Does any of that help?
It does, and thank you for the reply.
How should we define “pleasure”? -- A difficult question. As you mention, it is a cloud of concepts, not a single one. It’s even more difficult because there appears to be precious little driving the standardization of the word—e.g., if I use the word ‘chair’ differently than others, it’s obvious, people will correct me, and our usages will converge. If I use the word ‘pleasure’ differently than others, that won’t be as obvious because it’s a subjective experience, and there’ll be much less convergence toward a common usage.
But I’d say that in practice, these problems tend to work themselves out, at least enough for my purposes. E.g., if I say “think of pure, unadulterated agony” to a room of 10000 people, I think the vast majority would arrive at fairly similar thoughts. Likewise, if I asked 10000 people to think of “pure, unadulterated bliss… the happiest moment in your life”, I think most would arrive at thoughts which share certain attributes, and none (<.01%) would invert answers to these two questions.
I find this “we know it when we see it” definitional approach completely philosophically unsatisfying, but it seems to work well enough for my purposes, which is to find mathematical commonalities across brain-states people identify as ‘pleasurable’, and different mathematical commonalities across brain-states people identify as ‘painful’.
I see what you mean by “the meaning of a word is hardly ever accurately given by any necessary-and-sufficient conditions that can be stated explicitly in a reasonable amount of space, because that just isn’t the way human minds work.” On the other hand, all words are imperfect and we need to talk about this somehow. How about this: (1) what are the characteristic mathematics of (i.e., found disproportionally in) self-identified pleasurable brain states?
“what are the characteristic mathematics of (i.e., found disproportionally in) self-identified pleasurable brain states?”
Certain areas of the brain get more active and certain hormones get into the bloodstream. How does this help you out?