Do you have any thoughts on whether valenced experience is asymmetrical, i.e. whether the most negative experiences (e.g. 10⁄10 on some suitable pain scale) are more bad than the most positive ones (e.g. 10⁄10 on some suitable pleasure scale) are good?
My hunch is that the worst experiences are more intense, at least if you exclude weird/rare things like Jhanas and 5-MeO-DMT trips, e.g. I’d give up days or weeks of ‘maximum happiness’ to avoid being burned alive for a minute. But not everyone shares this intuition, and I’m not sure how to settle the debate (at least until you prove and operationalise your symmetry theory of valence).
Do you have any thoughts on whether valenced experience is asymmetrical, i.e. whether the most negative experiences (e.g. 10⁄10 on some suitable pain scale) are more bad than the most positive ones (e.g. 10⁄10 on some suitable pleasure scale) are good?
My hunch is that the worst experiences are more intense, at least if you exclude weird/rare things like Jhanas and 5-MeO-DMT trips, e.g. I’d give up days or weeks of ‘maximum happiness’ to avoid being burned alive for a minute. But not everyone shares this intuition, and I’m not sure how to settle the debate (at least until you prove and operationalise your symmetry theory of valence).