Adding to what Lucas mentioned (how we are motivated in part by longing/addiction for strong rewards): Suffering and negative reinforcement are correlated but are by no means the same thing. In the case of extreme suffering, there seems to be a point where the pain has already maxed out in terms of negative reinforcement capacity, and anything above it is just senseless suffering. Cluster headaches would not cause any less behavioral suppression if they were 10 or even 100 times less painful. Likewise, our ability to reason about pain and pleasure is limited by our state-dependent ability to imagine it. As I argued in the article, our ability to imagine any pain or pleasure that goes beyond our ability to extrapolate with the qualia accessible to us at the moment is very limited.
The bliss of 5-MeO-DMT or epileptic temporal lobe seizures is as Dostoevsky said “a happiness unthinkable in the normal state and unimaginable for anyone who hasn’t experienced it”. Likewise for extreme pain. So you wouldn’t be able to infer that these states exist (and are much more prevalent than one intuitively believes) merely from observing the patterns of reinforcement from a third-person point of view.
Adding to what Lucas mentioned (how we are motivated in part by longing/addiction for strong rewards): Suffering and negative reinforcement are correlated but are by no means the same thing. In the case of extreme suffering, there seems to be a point where the pain has already maxed out in terms of negative reinforcement capacity, and anything above it is just senseless suffering. Cluster headaches would not cause any less behavioral suppression if they were 10 or even 100 times less painful. Likewise, our ability to reason about pain and pleasure is limited by our state-dependent ability to imagine it. As I argued in the article, our ability to imagine any pain or pleasure that goes beyond our ability to extrapolate with the qualia accessible to us at the moment is very limited.
The bliss of 5-MeO-DMT or epileptic temporal lobe seizures is as Dostoevsky said “a happiness unthinkable in the normal state and unimaginable for anyone who hasn’t experienced it”. Likewise for extreme pain. So you wouldn’t be able to infer that these states exist (and are much more prevalent than one intuitively believes) merely from observing the patterns of reinforcement from a third-person point of view.