Pleasures and pains are not always as we think they are
I can't say I've spent twenty years on a mountain, but I have meditated enough at this point to realize that our experiences are not always as we think they are. It is common even for strong-seeming feelings to dissolve under scrutiny, leaving behind the impression that somehow they were never really there.
Take itchiness. When I think my arm is “feeling itchy”, and I close my eyes and concentrate on what
exactly I feel, I find I feel my arm tingling; I feel a physical impulse “inside” the other arm, poised to reach over and scratch; I might even hear a faint voice inside my head whispering “ugh, this is so itchy!” or a faint image in my mind's eye of the second arm scratching the first. But that's it. Usually, once the feeling has been decomposed into these parts, no
quale I would call “itchiness” remains.
When I scrutinize feelings of pleasure and pain, I find that they tend to partially disintegrate into non-valenced feelings like pressure, tingling, and impulses and chattering internal voices encouraging me to approach or avoid this or that. I have never been in severe pain, and I have not been able to thoroughly dissolve even the minor pain of a stubbed toe. But I can report that when I am mindful, the intrinsic goodness or badness of an experience usually seems to lessen.
Pain and pleasure are so tightly associated with intrinsic experienced “positiveness” and “negativeness” that the former are sometimes used as shorthand for the latter, or even mistaken for the latter. But they are not the same, as we can see from the possibility of “
pain asymbolia”—the strange (and, one might imagine, extremely fortunate!) condition of being able to register that one is in pain “without feeling any unpleasantness”. This is perhaps one clue that our intuitions about valence are really surprisingly broken. In any event, from here on I'll use the terms “pleasure” and “displeasure” to refer to what might more technically be called “positive and negative valence”, isolating the intuitive axis of intrinsic goodness and badness from the kinds of sensations (like pain) which almost always move with it.
How revisionary should we be here?
The least revisionary account compatible with my experience would be that pleasures and displeasures are roughly as intense, in the moment, as we remember them to be, but that some deliberate mental effort can moderately diminish their intensity. This would seem to be the claim made by the Sallatha Sutta that suffering is like “two arrows”. The first, in the Buddha's analogy, is the direct cause of the suffering: a physical arrow, say, which causes real displeasure completely outside our control. The second is the magnification of that displeasure by our mental habit of angrily dwelling on it, thinking about it, and wishing it were gone. The second sort of displeasure is as real as the first, if we have it, but we can turn it down.
A more revisionary account would be that
all displeasure (and all pleasure) is of the kind we can eliminate with enough practice. (Calvin Baker, a friend who has studied Buddhism in some depth, tells me that this is also how some scholars of Buddhism—such as Stephen E. Harris in “Suffering and the Shape of Well-Being in Buddhist Ethics”—interpret the Sallatha Sutta. The outside world intrudes with some non-valenced “pain”, but its negative hedonic valence is entirely self-inflicted and avoidable.)
But a third possibility I don't think I can rule out—this one I'm told is
not compatible with any interpretation of Buddhism—is that we never experience displeasure and pleasure of any sort. We only ever experience non-valenced qualia, like tingling and pressure and impulses to approach or avoid. The illusion of valence arises from the fact that we near-instantaneously tag our memories and anticipations with language like “that felt terrible” or “that will feel good”, but none of that really means anything at bottom. If this possibility sounds crazy, and if you're not persuaded by the itchiness analogy, consider the fact that in some sense we never see anything move, either. All we ever see is what we see in the moment, and the illusion of motion is constructed from memories in which a shape recently occupied a different place in our fields of vision.
I have seen many people, such as
Daniel Dennett and
Brian Tomasik, express a position sometimes called
qualia eliminativism. This is the position that there are no qualia at all. I have never been able to make sense of this position, and I still can't. Some supposed qualia vanish on inspection, but others—like redness, to give the quintessential example—do not; and the ones that do vanish do so precisely by dissolving into the ones that don't. But if even qualia eliminativism is a position it's possible for the human mind to hold, we should be able to draw a spectrum from the qualia eliminativists to the believers in common-sense redness and motion and pleasure and displeasure. In particular, it seems like it must be possible to hold the position that pleasure and displeasure are never experienced, even if many other things are. This position must be well-known in some corner of philosophy or eastern religion, but I haven't seen anyone express it. My searches must not be using the right keywords. In the meantime, anyway, I'll call the position “valence eliminativism”.
Two arguments for valence eliminativism
One tentative argument is the observation that valence is so different from any other class of qualia. Sights and sounds and such all teach us something relatively straightforward about the shape of the world. Feelings of valence seem to lie on a radically different axis, one not having much to do with the world at all: the axis from
good to
bad. Like Mackie's famous (
1977) argument that moral facts probably don't exist because they would be so “queerly” different from all other facts, one might make the argument that we should be suspicious of valence because of its apparent uniqueness among qualia.
Eliminating valence also conveniently eliminates the mystery of why valence would have evolved. Knowing that a given experience is pleasant or unpleasant seems to confer no evolutionary advantages at all, except insofar as that knowledge accompanies a motivation to pursue the former over the latter. But we have all kinds of motivations, like altruism and whimsy, that have nothing to do with the valence of our own future experiences. Why couldn't we just evolve adaptive motivations on their own? One explanation might be that pleasures and displeasures cheaply generate “reasons for action” that, in some mysterious way, sufficiently advanced minds will perceive and be moved by. But perhaps a simpler explanation would be that all we really have are the motivations, tightly and confusingly woven together with experiences like pressure that neutrally confer information about the world.
Decision-relevance
I've discussed this thought with several people now. A few have replied that even if we don't experience pleasure and displeasure in the sense that we naively think we do, we still have these analogous constructs—the memories and impulses and so on—and so maybe we're just supposed to care about those instead. To the extent that a hedonic utilitarian is persuaded of valence eliminativism, it might make sense to switch to being, say, some sort of preference utilitarian.
This move strikes me as similar to a move from realism to subjectivism in moral philosophy. I disagree with it in both cases. My main objection is that if some of the things you care about exist and some are illusory, it's obviously important to determine which are which. If I learned that bike trips provided no pleasure while I was on them, and that all their appeal was a bizarre trick of anticipation and memory, I would want to stop going on bike trips and start spending that time on truly enjoyable activities. If neuroscientists discovered that the only true pleasure anyone ever experienced was the taste of peaches, I would urge everyone to stop wasting their charity on anything non-peach-related. Why would there be some discontinuity such that if there are
no good or bad experiences, I go back to being a fan of bike trips? Likewise, if a moral realist learns that some of what she had thought were her moral duties were actually just preferences instilled by an amoral brainwasher, she stops caring about those but keeps caring about the duties that still stand some chance of being real. Why should she return to her intuitive preferences once the number of real duties hits zero? If we start out hedonic utilitarians but become convinced that there is no valence, or if we start out moral realists and become convinced that there are no moral truths, I think we should just be indifferent between all acts, and admit that the universe has lost all its value.
One might also object that, in a valence-free world, all preferences are simply permissible, and that there is no sense advocating for conditional indifference in particular. This neglects two complications.
First, we might have uncertainty about valence eliminativism, and this uncertainty might not be independent from our uncertainty about other things. For instance, we might know that pushing a button will either cause or (just as likely) prevent a torture, and we might know that either Person A or (just as likely) Person B is systematically more intelligent and thoughtful and trustworthy than the other. Person A might then tell us “valence exists and the button will prevent a torture”, while B tells us “valence doesn't exist and the button will cause a torture”. We will only reliably do the right thing (push the button) if we are indifferent to torture conditional on valence eliminativism.
Second is the chance that all our imagined pleasures and displeasures are like the shadows on the cave-wall, representing a possibility the world has always represented and anticipated but never known, and that all our efforts should be organized around the hope of some Real Pleasure on the first good day.