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Comment by Lucent | Hacker News Reader

Few of the comments here seem to discuss his point. He asks if pleasure to pain is a continuum, why have pain at all? Instead of -1 to 1, with negative representing unpleasantness, human experience can instead span 0 to 2 and have the same reinforcement value with no sensation of displeasure.

My understanding of his answer is if this were the case, we wouldn't always avoid lesser pleasant sensations and may even seek them out to enjoy the rebound to greater pleasure. If burning your skin knocks you from baseline (1 instead of 0 for this example) to 0 (instead of -1), and the relief of stopping the burn kicked you up to 2 as a reward for escaping it, you'll just repeatedly burn your arm. Only negative values ensure you'll never seek them out for the purpose of rebounding to higher values.

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A good argument, but not applicable for people practicing self-harm.

A quotation from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-harm below:

“Those who engage in self-harm face the contradictory reality of harming themselves while at the same time obtaining relief from this act.

It may even be hard for some to actually initiate cutting, but they often do because they know the relief that will follow. For some self-harmers this relief is primarily psychological while for others this feeling of relief comes from the beta endorphins released in the brain. Endorphins are endogenous opioids that are released in response to physical injury, acting as natural painkillers and inducing pleasant feelings, and in response to self-harm would act to reduce tension and emotional distress. Many self-harmers report feeling very little to no pain while self-harming and, for some, deliberate self-harm may become a means of seeking pleasure.”

Pathologies are not, in the general case, a rebuttal to an argument about behavior.

Pathology is just personality when you use a -1 to 1 scale instead of a 0 to 1 scale.

There seems to be more to it than just that, or so the argument goes. The example of people wearing prosthetics to warn of damaging situations seemed relevant: they would disable the electric shock, do what they wanted, then re-enable it.

For pain to carry value it must represent the ground truth and can't be easily ignorable. That makes it carry a very large cost to override which is important since as the examples demonstrate the long-term consequences of an inability to feel pain can be quite severe.

I suppose that ties in to what you said: humans are way too bad a long-term thinking to properly evaluate consequences so we would end up burning ourselves or hacking off a limb to achieve a short-term reward. Or at least enough of us would be that our species would never have made it this far.

If you only ever experience 0 to 2 with a baseline of 1 then that's no different experientially than -1 to 1 with a baseline of 0. Since baseline is going to be the 'normal' experience it's going to be routine in both cases. Whereas they'd be confused talking to one another as the overlap of baselines is at the most positive and most negative positions versus one another.

Basically if we were to go through life only experiencing pleasure would less pleasure basically be pain if you had no capacity to feel or understand pain.

Plus the whole idea that pleasure and pain are a continuum seems overly simplistic.

Unless you remind yourself what -1 means. Is like how people have a house, and then they bitch about it because it doesn’t have enough garages(that’s like -1 1). But if they know about people renting basements. They can still become 0 2.

Is also what being grateful is all about, it can keep you happy even at bad times

Right but those are different parameters.

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