Interesting- to attempt to re-state your notion: it’s more important to avoid death than get an easy meal, so pain&aversion should come easier than pleasure.
I’d agree with this, but perhaps this is overdetermined in that both evolution and substrate lead us to “pleasure is centralized&highly contextual, pain is distributed&easily caused”.
I.e., I would expect that given a set of conscious systems with randomized configurations, valence probably doesn’t fall into a standard distribution. Rather, my expectation is that high-valence states will be outnumbered by low-valence states… and so, just like it’s easier to destroy value than create it, it’s easier to create negative valence than positive valence. Thus, positive valence requires centralized coordination (hedonic regions) and is easily disrupted by nociceptors (injections of entropy are unlikely to push the system toward positive states, since those are rare).
One possible explanation why we have nociceptors but not direct pleasure-ceptors is that there’s no stimulus that’s always fitness-enhancing (or is there?), while flames, skin wounds, etc. are always bad. Sugar receptors usually convey pleasure, but not if you’re full, nauseous, etc.
Also, we can’t have simple pleasure-ceptors for beautiful images or music because those stimuli require complex processing by visual or auditory cortices; there’s no “pleasant music molecule” that can stimulate a pleasure-ceptor neuron the way there are pleasant-tasting gustatory molecules.
there’s no stimulus that’s always fitness-enhancing (or is there?), while flames, skin wounds, etc. are always bad. Sugar receptors usually convey pleasure, but not if you’re full, nauseous, etc.
Yeah, strongly agree.
Additionally, accidentally wireheading oneself had to have been at least a big potential problem during evolution, which would strongly select against anything like a pleasure-ceptor.
Hmm—I’d suggest that if pleasure-ceptors are easy contextually habituated, they might not be pleasure-ceptors per se.
(Pleasure is easily habituated; pain is not. This is unfortunate but seems adaptive, at least in the AE...)
My intuition is that if an organism did have dedicated pleasure-ceptors, it would probably immediately become its biggest failure-point (internal dynamics breaking down) and attack surface (target for others to exploit in order to manipulate behavior, which wouldn’t trigger fight/flight like most manipulations do).
Arguably, we do see both of these things happen to some degree with regard to “pseudo-pleasure-ceptors” in the pelvis(?).
Coordination being required for pleasure makes a lot of sense if the thing that we care about is a fragile, high dimensional thing, such as robustness of a pattern over time in a hard to predict environment.
While large mechanosensory neurons such as type I/group Aß display adaptation, smaller type IV/group C nociceptive neurons do not. As a result, pain does not usually subside rapidly but persists for long periods of time; in contrast, one quickly stops receiving touch or sensory information if surroundings remain constant.
Arguably, we do see both of these things happen to some degree with regard to “pseudo-pleasure-ceptors” in the pelvis(?).
The frustrating inverse point makes me think this is a reflection of the asymmetric payoff structure in the AE.
Interesting- to attempt to re-state your notion: it’s more important to avoid death than get an easy meal, so pain&aversion should come easier than pleasure.
I’d agree with this, but perhaps this is overdetermined in that both evolution and substrate lead us to “pleasure is centralized&highly contextual, pain is distributed&easily caused”.
I.e., I would expect that given a set of conscious systems with randomized configurations, valence probably doesn’t fall into a standard distribution. Rather, my expectation is that high-valence states will be outnumbered by low-valence states… and so, just like it’s easier to destroy value than create it, it’s easier to create negative valence than positive valence. Thus, positive valence requires centralized coordination (hedonic regions) and is easily disrupted by nociceptors (injections of entropy are unlikely to push the system toward positive states, since those are rare).
One possible explanation why we have nociceptors but not direct pleasure-ceptors is that there’s no stimulus that’s always fitness-enhancing (or is there?), while flames, skin wounds, etc. are always bad. Sugar receptors usually convey pleasure, but not if you’re full, nauseous, etc.
Also, we can’t have simple pleasure-ceptors for beautiful images or music because those stimuli require complex processing by visual or auditory cortices; there’s no “pleasant music molecule” that can stimulate a pleasure-ceptor neuron the way there are pleasant-tasting gustatory molecules.
Yeah, strongly agree.
Additionally, accidentally wireheading oneself had to have been at least a big potential problem during evolution, which would strongly select against anything like a pleasure-ceptor.
Hm, I would think that hedonic adaptation/habituation could be applied to stimuli from pleasure-ceptors fairly easily?
Hmm—I’d suggest that if pleasure-ceptors are easy contextually habituated, they might not be pleasure-ceptors per se.
(Pleasure is easily habituated; pain is not. This is unfortunate but seems adaptive, at least in the AE...)
My intuition is that if an organism did have dedicated pleasure-ceptors, it would probably immediately become its biggest failure-point (internal dynamics breaking down) and attack surface (target for others to exploit in order to manipulate behavior, which wouldn’t trigger fight/flight like most manipulations do).
Arguably, we do see both of these things happen to some degree with regard to “pseudo-pleasure-ceptors” in the pelvis(?).
Coordination being required for pleasure makes a lot of sense if the thing that we care about is a fragile, high dimensional thing, such as robustness of a pattern over time in a hard to predict environment.
Not sure why that is unless you’re just defining things that way, which is fine. :)
BTW, this page says
Yeah, as well as with various other addictions.