The unity and commensurability of pleasures and pains
Philosophia, vol. 41, no. 2, 2013, pp. 527–543
Abstract
Pleasures and pains present a philosophical tension between the intuition that they are unified, commensurable phenomena and the heterogeneity objection, which highlights their diverse qualitative characters. While experiences of pleasure and pain appear to share common properties that allow for quantitative ranking, the inclusive range of such states—spanning from sensory gratification to intellectual satisfaction and from physical injury to emotional grief—suggests a lack of a single shared quality. Standard attempts to resolve this conflict, such as response theory and split experience theory, prove inadequate. Response theory erroneously defines hedonic states through external reactions like desire or aversion, reversing the causal order of experience, while split experience theory fails to account for the phenomenological unity of sensation and hedonic tone.
A more robust resolution is found in dimensionalism, which posits that pleasure and pain are not distinct mental events but opposite poles of a hedonic dimension inherent to conscious states. Similar to how auditory volume is an aspect of sound rather than a separate sound itself, hedonic tone is an abstract dimension along which qualitatively diverse experiences vary. This framework accounts for both the heterogeneity of sensations and their quantitative commensurability. It aligns with evolutionary models of consciousness where valence serves as a fundamental mechanism for behavioral guidance, ensuring that unity and commensurability are preserved as intrinsic features of experience without denying qualitative diversity. – AI-generated abstract.
Quotes from this work
If we take for granted that consciousness evolved, consciousness would somehow have to promote survival and reproduction in order to be selected for. If consciousness did not promote survival and preproduction, it would not be selected for, and to the extent that it were biologically costly, it would be selected against. The only way consciousness could promote survival and reproduction, moreover, is by virtue of guiding an organism’s actions, prompting it to perform survival and reproduction enhancing actions – and the only way in which consciousness could prompt an organism towards survival and reproduction seems to be by imbuing experiences with a certain valence or a pro/con attitude. Without a valence or a pro/con attitude, it is unclear how an experience would be able to guide an organism’s actions. Evolution, moreover, cares for action, not for experiences as an end in itself. It therefore seems that if consciousness were to ever get going, valence would have to be present from the very start. Otherwise, consciousness would disappear as fast as it occurred. This suggests that hedonic valence phylogentically is as old as consciousness itself, which in turn lends support to the view that hedonic valence lies at the heart of consciousness. This supports dimensionalism, moreover, since according to dimensionalism, pleasure and pain—rather than being two things out of the many things we can experience—imbues all […] our experiences. Indeed, one might, from a dimensionalist approach to consciousness, argue that the first experience any organism ever had was an experience of either pleasure or pain, and that consciousness of the kind our species has today is a more fine-grained version of something that is most fundamentally a pleasure/pain mechanism.