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Pleasure, Displeasure, and Representation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Timothy Schroeder
Timothy Schroeder*
Affiliation:
University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, CanadaR3T 2M8
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Extract

Pleasure and displeasure have been suffering from intellectual neglect in the philosophy of mind. In contemporary work, the mode of experience which effectively dominates discussion is vision—David Marr's work on visual representation and L. Weiskrantz's work on blindsight are familiar to many philosophers of mind, as are the philosophical uses of such work, and no one seems to tire of working out what the frog's eye tells the frog's brain. Who, though, can name a leading theorist of pain? As a source of examples and intuitions, pain is a perennial favorite in ethics and the philosophy of mind, but in both disciplines pain is taken for granted far more often than it is the object of analysis. Equally significantly, forms of displeasure other than pains are very largely neglected. Pleasure, for its part, has been the nigh-exclusive province of moral theorists; few other than Strawson seem to have taken a special interest in it in the philosophy of mind. The object of the present work is to rectify this neglect, and to give an account of pleasure and displeasure which reveals a striking degree of unity and theoretical tractability underlying the diverse phenomena: a representationalist account.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , December 2001 , pp. 507 - 530
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2001

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References

1 Thanks to colleagues at the University of Manitoba and friends at the University of Lethbridge, and to Sarah Buss, Fred Dretske, William Lycan, Andrew Melnyk, Eric Schwitzgebel, and three anonymous referees for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper, and to the University of Manitoba and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for financial support.

2 Marr, D. Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Information (New York: Freeman 1982)Google Scholar and Weiskrantz, L. Blindsight: A Case Study and Implications (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1986Google Scholar)

3 See, for example, Dennett, D. Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown 1991)Google Scholar and Block, N. ‘On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness,’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (1995) 227–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar on blindsight, and Burge, T. ‘Individualism and Psychology,’ Philosophical Review 95 (1986) 3–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar and McGinn, C. Mental Content (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell 1989)Google Scholar on Marr.

4 Two noteworthy exceptions are Dennett, Daniel ‘Why You Can't Make a Computer that Feels Pain,’ in Dennett, D. Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1978)Google Scholar and Hardcastle, Valerie Gray ‘When A Pain Is Not,’ Journal of Philosophy 94 (1997) 381–409CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Strawson, G. Mental Reality (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1994)Google Scholar. One important exception is Davis, W. ‘A Causal Theory of Enjoyment,’ Mind 91 (1982) 240–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Davis's account of pleasure is importantly different from the one which follows, most particularly in that it holds pleasure not to be a sensation (241) and not to be representational in character, but there are still a number of congruences between the two theories.

6 For instance, it is often held that only representational structures which feed cognitive systems contribute to experience, and representations which constitute cognitive systems are something quite separate from those representations underlying experience. Another significant qualification made to representational theories is that they must be combined with functionalist theories for distinguishing, e.g., different modes of experience. Just how to qualify the basic representationalist thesis is, of course, itself a matter of controversy among representationalists.

7 Prominent representationalists include Dretske, F. Naturalizing the Mind (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1995)Google Scholar; Harman, G. ‘The Intrinsic Quality of Experience,’ Tomberlin, J. ed., Philosophical Perspectives vol. 4 (Atascadero: Ridgeview 1990)Google Scholar; Lycan, W. Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1987)Google Scholar; and Tye, M. Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational Theory of the Phenomenal Mind (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dennett in Consciousness Explained is arguably another instance of the type.

8 E.g., Peacocke, C. Sense and Content: Experience, Thought, and their Relations (London: Oxford University Press 1983)Google Scholar

9 E.g., Block, N. ‘Mental Paint and Mental Latex,’ Villanueva, E. ed., Perception (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview 1995)Google ScholarPubMed and ‘On a Confusion.’

10 This is a result of their having a basis in a system of receptors, the nociceptors, sensitive to tissue damage. See Kandel, E. Schwartz, J. and Jessell, T. Principles of Neural Science 4th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill 2000)Google Scholar.

11 See Melzack, R. The Puzzle of Pain (New York: Basic Books 1973), 93–6Google Scholar. Melzack writes of frontal lobotomy patients that ‘The predominant effect of lobotomy appears to be on the motivational-affective dimension of the whole pain experience. The aversive quality of the pain and the drive to seek pain relief both appear to be diminished’ (95). Comments such as ‘input, even at intense, noxious levels, seems never to well up into frank pain’ are used to characterize the other two sorts of cases. (For a somewhat different interpretation of similar evidence, see ‘Why You Can't Make a Computer that Feels Pain’ in Dennett's Brainstorms.)

12 At points, Tye seems inclined to identify pleasure and displeasure with the motivational roles other representations have. For a response to this, see below.

13 And, it now appears, meatiness.

14 Akins, Though K. ‘Of Sensory Systems and the “Aboutness” of Mental States,’ Journal of Philosophy 93 (1996) 337–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar, disputes that our thermal sense is representational.

15 Kosslyn, S. Image and Brain: The Resolution of the Imagery Debate (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 See especially his ‘Pleasure,’ Collected Papers vol. 2 (London: Hutchinson 1971).

17 Berridge, K. ‘Pleasure, Pain, Desire, and Dread: Hidden Core Processes of Emotion,’ Kahneman, D. Diener, E. and Schwarz, N. eds., Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology (New York: Russell Sage 1999)Google Scholar; Berridge, K. and Robinson, T. ‘What is the Role of Dopamine in Reward: Hedonic Impact, Reward Learning, or Incentive Salience?’ Brain Research Reviews 28 (1998) 309–69CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

18 This theory of pleasure and displeasure echoes ideas found in the Philebus (33e ff.), while taking them in directions somewhat different from those Plato would endorse. Thanks to an anonymous referee for bringing this to my attention.

19 Change in level of net intrinsic desire satisfaction. must be measured relative to some baseline level, of course. I have no particular hypothesis about what precisely sets this baseline, but it seems to be an average over the not-too-recent, not-too-distant past.

20 As an anonymous referee has pointed out, this presupposes that pleasure and displeasure are unified phenomena—that the pleasures of intellectual achievement and sexual activity, for example, considered only as pleasures (ignoring the attendant phenomenology of autonomic arousal, mental imagery, etc.) vary only in time course and intensity, and, further, differ from all forms of displeasure only as feelings of warmth differ from feelings of cold, through being experiences on a positive or negative end of a continuum. I find this so phenomenologically plausible that I confess to being at a loss to defend it through argument. If the represented loudness of a horrifying artillery bombardment can be as great as the represented loudness of an enjoyable rock music concert or a thrilling spacecraft launch, which I take it no philosopher of mind would deny, then I see no reason to deny that pleasantness too is a unified type of representation. I suppose that other individuals might have phenomenologies different from mine, as a result of having different structures underlying the perception of desire satisfaction; if this is the case, then the present theory will only serve as a theory of pleasure and displeasure in the cases of individuals such as myself, but I am reluctant to draw such a conclusion without more information.

21 See, e.g., Evans, G. Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1982)Google Scholar; McDowell, J. Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1994)Google Scholar; C. Peacocke, Sense and Content.

22 Not coincidentally, this is the conclusion Sousa, R. De The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge: The MIT Press 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Charland, L. ‘Feeling and Representing: Computational Theory and the Modularity of Affect,’ Synthese 105 (1995) 273–301CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reach about the emotions. But it should be noted that I am using the heading ‘modularity’ to consider just one aspect of it, namely informational encapsulation. Fodor, J. The Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar discusses eight other features of modules, including the fact that the operation of a module is mandatory, that its intermediate representations are not available for use outside the module, that modules operate rapidly, etc. I do not attempt to show that hedonic processing has all these features, though, and so I leave it open that (as an anonymous referee has suggested) hedonic processing is sometimes better thought of as simply responding to transduced stimuli, rather than being modular (all sensory modules respond to transduced stimuli, but not everything so responding need be a module). Whether hedonic processing is genuinely, full-bloodedly modular is an interesting question, but one I leave for another occasion.

23 Elster, J. Strong Feelings: Emotion, Addiction, and Human Behavior (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1999), 53CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 Schultz, W. Tremblay, L. and Hollerman, J. ‘Reward Processing in Primate Orbitofrontal Cortex and Basal Ganglia,’ Cerebral Cortex 10 (2000) 272–83CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

25 Frisby, J. Seeing: Illusion, Brain and Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1979)Google Scholar

26 A related phenomenon (pointed out to me by William Lycan) is the use of a coin toss to determine what one wants. One narrows the options to two, assigns each to one face of the coin, and tosses the coin. If one is pleased with the way the toss has come up, one can conclude that that is what one most wanted to do all along. If one is displeased (and perhaps wishes to make some excuse to ‘try again’) then one has good reason to believe one prefers the other option. Again, pleasure and displeasure provide evidence for what we want.

27 Charland, L. ‘Reconciling Cognitive and Perceptual Theories of Emotion: A Representational Proposal,’ Philosophy of Science 64 (1997) 555–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Charland mentions the theories of Robert Solomon, William Lyons, and Robert Gordon as important cognitive theories; the theories of William James, Patricia Greenspan, Ronald de Sousa, and Stanley Clarke number amongst the perceptual theories Charland identifies. For full citations, see Charland, ‘Reconciling,’ 557Google Scholar.

28 Damasio, A. ‘Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Grosset/Putnam 1994)Google Scholar

29 Thanks to Andrew Melnyk for raising this point.

30 This is the primary role given to desires by Dretske, F. Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1988)Google Scholar.

31 Thanks to an anonymous referee for this point.

32 Thanks to an anonymous referee for this point.