I can certainly group pleasures into consistent and overlapping categories. Most things that give me pleasure:
make me feel good about myself
make me look good in the eyes of anyone else present
involve giving another person or people pleasure
involve executing some sort of well-defined skill
involve some sort of satisfying pattern-matching
involve discovery of something clever
Anything that isn’t in this list which I might describe as pleasurable involves some sort of direct physiological pleasure-giving stimulus (orgasm, chocolate, etc.).
I’m pretty sure that based on this criteria I can predict with a fair degree of accuracy whether or not I will find an activity pleasurable; the more criteria an activity meets, the more likely I am to gain pleasure from it, and the greater that pleasure will be. If a coherent concept of pleasure doesn’t exist, what am I predicting?
I can certainly group pleasures into consistent and overlapping categories. Most things that give me pleasure:
make me feel good about myself
make me look good in the eyes of anyone else present
involve giving another person or people pleasure
involve executing some sort of well-defined skill
involve some sort of satisfying pattern-matching
involve discovery of something clever
Anything that isn’t in this list which I might describe as pleasurable involves some sort of direct physiological pleasure-giving stimulus (orgasm, chocolate, etc.).
I’m pretty sure that based on this criteria I can predict with a fair degree of accuracy whether or not I will find an activity pleasurable; the more criteria an activity meets, the more likely I am to gain pleasure from it, and the greater that pleasure will be. If a coherent concept of pleasure doesn’t exist, what am I predicting?