Also, there’s a natural neutral/zero point for rewards separating pleasure and suffering in animals: subnetwork inactivity. Not just unconsciousness, but some experiences feel like they have no or close to no valence, and this is probably reflected in lower activity in valence-generating subnetworks. If this doesn’t hold for some entity, we should be skeptical that they experience pleasure or suffering at all. (They could experience only one, with the neutral point strictly to one side, the low valence intensity side.)
Plus, my guess is that pleasure and suffering are generated in not totally overlapping structures of animal brains, so shifting rewards more negative, say, would mean more activity in suffering structures and less in the pleasure structures.
Still, one thing I wonder is whether preferences without natural neutral points can still matter. Someone can have preferences between two precise states of affairs (or features of them), but not believe either is good or bad in absolute terms. They could even have something like moods that are ranked, but no neutral mood. Such values could still potentially be aggregated for comparisons, but you’d probably need to use some kind of preference-affecting view if you don’t want to make arbitrary assumptions about where the neutral points should be.
Also, there’s a natural neutral/zero point for rewards separating pleasure and suffering in animals: subnetwork inactivity. Not just unconsciousness, but some experiences feel like they have no or close to no valence, and this is probably reflected in lower activity in valence-generating subnetworks. If this doesn’t hold for some entity, we should be skeptical that they experience pleasure or suffering at all. (They could experience only one, with the neutral point strictly to one side, the low valence intensity side.)
Plus, my guess is that pleasure and suffering are generated in not totally overlapping structures of animal brains, so shifting rewards more negative, say, would mean more activity in suffering structures and less in the pleasure structures.
Still, one thing I wonder is whether preferences without natural neutral points can still matter. Someone can have preferences between two precise states of affairs (or features of them), but not believe either is good or bad in absolute terms. They could even have something like moods that are ranked, but no neutral mood. Such values could still potentially be aggregated for comparisons, but you’d probably need to use some kind of preference-affecting view if you don’t want to make arbitrary assumptions about where the neutral points should be.