A worry I have about your model is the conflation of ‘pain’ and ‘negative value of experience’.
On a superficial level: pain asymbolia exists, masochism exists, many people actively enjoy spicy food (and keep very-hot sauce around to put on their own food on a regular basis out of enjoyment, not just as a novelty), et cetera. There are people who don’t experience pain as negatively-valenced, or do so only in limited circumstances, and running those people’s pain together with more direct emotional-state-related concerns such as grieving or depression is going to lead to confused results.
But let’s grant that pain asymbolia and masochism and so forth are unusual and probably not direct factors in most people’s feelings about most pain. Still, their existence points at an important deeper truth: there are cognitive indirection-layers between sensory experiences and the values placed thereupon. And thus there’s room for the logarithm to be re-flattened to some extent—albeit not necessarily all the way—through those indirection-layers. It’s possible for someone to be in ten times as much pain-as-sensory-experience without experiencing ten times as much unpleasantness from it, even if they’re still experiencing more unpleasantness from it. And my default intuition is to expect that abstract structure to be far more widespread than its particularly-extreme instantiations might be.
(For one thing, the entire concept of the hedonic treadmill rests on that sort of indirection-layer existing—change in valenced response to a stimulus with repetition even as the stimulus holds constant—and as far as I know the hedonic treadmill is somewhere close-ish to a human universal. So it seems very unlikely that there’s any large fraction of the population for which such an indirection-layer doesn’t exist.)
Similar-but-milder concerns apply to conflation of ‘pleasure’ and ‘positive value of experience’; I suspect those might cause sexual experiences to be overweighted in your sample, because a common use of ‘pleasure’ is to refer, not to positively-valenced experience in the abstract, but rather to specific sorts of sensory experience commonly associated with sex, and then the same “there’s an indirection between the sensory experience and its emotional impact in which the logarithmic curve can be re-flattened to some extent” issue is likely to apply to those cases.
Very good points. QRI has a lot to say about all of these points, so I won’t repeat myself too much. I’ll address a couple points, but note there is a lot more to say that you can dig into in the provided links:
I think that pain is a particular manifestation of negative valence. It can trigger positive valence indirectly via e.g. energizing the system and then triggering neural annealing—nice waves of euphoria that are secondary and after the fact which are the reinforcing bits. Pain sans this secondary element is just unpleasant and bad, albeit perhaps not as bad as what you get when you mix both emotional and low level sensory negative valence together.
Importantly: mixed valence certainly complicates the picture, but above a certain intensity of sensation pain overwhelms whetever else is going on.
Shinzen Young’s concept of equanimity as not resisting sensations is a critical modifier on the valence of experience. That said, I’d say this modifies valence of the whole experience, and doesn’t necessarily take care of the low-level sensory negative valence. Stil, the bulk of a person’s valence under normal circumstances might be the result of how much they resist their current experience (even if pleasant otherwise). Extreme levels of equanimity, I’m convinced, can drastically lower the negative valence effects of pain.
This, however, has a limit. Even highly attained meditators (the “Buddha” included) would describe extreme pain as still a cause of suffering. Daniel Ingram, for example, can tolerate broken bones and all kinds of very intense painful sensations without them turning into suffering, so to speak. But when he has a kidney stone then that overwhelms the system and even his meditation attainments aren’t enough to counter-balance it. He still suffers intensely with kidney stones when they happen.
Lastly, most intense forms of pain tend to have a strong emotional component by default. Cluster headaches, for example, typically come with a powerful sense of doom along with the pain. It’s just part of the package it seems.
A worry I have about your model is the conflation of ‘pain’ and ‘negative value of experience’.
On a superficial level: pain asymbolia exists, masochism exists, many people actively enjoy spicy food (and keep very-hot sauce around to put on their own food on a regular basis out of enjoyment, not just as a novelty), et cetera. There are people who don’t experience pain as negatively-valenced, or do so only in limited circumstances, and running those people’s pain together with more direct emotional-state-related concerns such as grieving or depression is going to lead to confused results.
But let’s grant that pain asymbolia and masochism and so forth are unusual and probably not direct factors in most people’s feelings about most pain. Still, their existence points at an important deeper truth: there are cognitive indirection-layers between sensory experiences and the values placed thereupon. And thus there’s room for the logarithm to be re-flattened to some extent—albeit not necessarily all the way—through those indirection-layers. It’s possible for someone to be in ten times as much pain-as-sensory-experience without experiencing ten times as much unpleasantness from it, even if they’re still experiencing more unpleasantness from it. And my default intuition is to expect that abstract structure to be far more widespread than its particularly-extreme instantiations might be.
(For one thing, the entire concept of the hedonic treadmill rests on that sort of indirection-layer existing—change in valenced response to a stimulus with repetition even as the stimulus holds constant—and as far as I know the hedonic treadmill is somewhere close-ish to a human universal. So it seems very unlikely that there’s any large fraction of the population for which such an indirection-layer doesn’t exist.)
Similar-but-milder concerns apply to conflation of ‘pleasure’ and ‘positive value of experience’; I suspect those might cause sexual experiences to be overweighted in your sample, because a common use of ‘pleasure’ is to refer, not to positively-valenced experience in the abstract, but rather to specific sorts of sensory experience commonly associated with sex, and then the same “there’s an indirection between the sensory experience and its emotional impact in which the logarithmic curve can be re-flattened to some extent” issue is likely to apply to those cases.
Very good points. QRI has a lot to say about all of these points, so I won’t repeat myself too much. I’ll address a couple points, but note there is a lot more to say that you can dig into in the provided links:
I think that pain is a particular manifestation of negative valence. It can trigger positive valence indirectly via e.g. energizing the system and then triggering neural annealing—nice waves of euphoria that are secondary and after the fact which are the reinforcing bits. Pain sans this secondary element is just unpleasant and bad, albeit perhaps not as bad as what you get when you mix both emotional and low level sensory negative valence together.
Importantly: mixed valence certainly complicates the picture, but above a certain intensity of sensation pain overwhelms whetever else is going on.
Shinzen Young’s concept of equanimity as not resisting sensations is a critical modifier on the valence of experience. That said, I’d say this modifies valence of the whole experience, and doesn’t necessarily take care of the low-level sensory negative valence. Stil, the bulk of a person’s valence under normal circumstances might be the result of how much they resist their current experience (even if pleasant otherwise). Extreme levels of equanimity, I’m convinced, can drastically lower the negative valence effects of pain.
This, however, has a limit. Even highly attained meditators (the “Buddha” included) would describe extreme pain as still a cause of suffering. Daniel Ingram, for example, can tolerate broken bones and all kinds of very intense painful sensations without them turning into suffering, so to speak. But when he has a kidney stone then that overwhelms the system and even his meditation attainments aren’t enough to counter-balance it. He still suffers intensely with kidney stones when they happen.
Lastly, most intense forms of pain tend to have a strong emotional component by default. Cluster headaches, for example, typically come with a powerful sense of doom along with the pain. It’s just part of the package it seems.
https://qualiacomputing.com/2021/04/04/buddhist-annealing-wireheading-done-right-with-the-seven-factors-of-awakening/
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bvtAXefTDQgHxc9BR/just-look-at-the-thing-how-the-science-of-consciousness
https://qri.org/blog/symmetry-theory-of-valence-2020
https://qualiacomputing.com/2019/09/30/harmonic-society-3-4-art-as-state-space-exploration-and-energy-parameter-modulation/