Jesper pointed out an absolutely fascinating paper: "Building a neuroscience of pleasure and well-being" by Kent C Berridge and Morten L Kringelbach. I've read much of this material before, but I thought this presentation of it was probably the most clear and readable I've seen. I would love to find a similar analysis of the mechanisms underlying suffering.

Here are some nice quotes from the piece:

Progress has been facilitated by the recognition that hedonic brain mechanisms are largely shared between humans and other mammals, allowing application of conclusions from animal studies to a better understanding of human pleasures. In the past few years, evidence has also grown to indicate that for humans, brain mechanisms of higher abstract pleasures strongly overlap with more basic sensory pleasures.

This is what one would expect because it's a lot harder for evolution to produce novel mechanisms for higher pleasures, but it's nice to have it confirmed. It's a nice point to cite when people look down upon "lower" forms of entertainment, etc.

Making this point again:

Most uniquely, humans have many prominent higher order, abstract or cultural pleasures, including personal achievement as well as intellectual, artistic, musical, altruistic, and transcendent pleasures. While the neuroscience of higher pleasures is in relative infancy, even here there seems overlap in brain circuits with more basic hedonic pleasures (Frijda 2010; Harris et al. 2009; Leknes and Tracey 2010; Salimpoor et al. 2011; Skov 2010; Vuust and Kringelbach 2010). As such, brains may be viewed as having conserved and re-cycled some of the same neural mechanisms of hedonic generation for higher pleasures that originated early in evolution for simpler sensory pleasures.

On animal pleasure mechanisms:

Some might be surprised by high similarity across species, or by substantial subcortical contributions, at least if one thinks of pleasure as uniquely human and as emerging only at the top of the brain. The neural similarity indicates an early phylogenetic appearance of neural circuits for pleasure and a conservation of those circuits, including deep brain circuits, in the elaboration of later species, including humans.

On eudaimonia:

Conceptually, hedonic processing and eudaimonic meaningfulness are very different from each other. Yet, empirically, in real people well-being has been found to involve both together. High questionnaire scores for hedonia and eudaimonia typically converge in the same happy individual (Diener et al. 2008; Kuppens et al. 2008).

Is the following relevant to discussions of the hard problem?

Note again, however, the underlying similarities of brain mechanisms for generating sensory pleasures in the brains of most mammals, both humans and nonhumans alike (Figure 3). It seems unlikely so much neural machinery would have been selected and conserved across species if it had no function. [...] In a sense, we suggest hedonic reactions have been too important to survival for pleasure to be exclusively subjective.

This is cool:

Analogous to scattered islands that form a single archipelago, the network of distributed hedonic hotspots forms a functional integrated circuit, which obeys control rules that are largely hierarchical and organized into brain levels (Aldridge et al. 1993; Berridge and Fentress 1986; Grill and Norgren 1978; Peciña et al. 2006). At the highest levels, the hotspot network may function as a more democratic heterarchy, in which unanimity of positive votes across hotspots is required in order to generate a greater pleasure. For example, any successful enhancement that starts in one hotspot involves recruiting neuronal activation across other hotspots simultaneously, to create a network of several that all vote ‘yes’ together for more pleasure (Smith et al. 2011). Conversely, a pleasure enhancement initiated by opioid activation of one hotspot can be vetoed by an opposite vote of ‘no’ from another hotspot where opioid signals are suppressed. Such findings reveal the need for unanimity across hotspots in order for a greater pleasure to be produced, and the potential fragility of hedonic enhancement if any hotspot defects (Smith and Berridge 2007; Smith et al. 2010).

Wanting without liking:

What could such reward electrodes or mesolimbic dopamine activations be doing, if not causing pleasure? One possible explanation is that they promote ‘wanting’ without ‘liking’.

Yvain talked about this in "Are Wireheads Happy?," as did Luke in "The Neuroscience of Pleasure." And of course, Dave Pearce has a whole website on the topic.

I still can't figure out: Why do we have liking, if wanting is all that's needed to motivate us to action? The only thing that comes to mind immediately is that liking could provide "good PR" for the experience. For example, smokers often tell non-smokers that "you shouldn't start smoking or you'll regret it." But an experience that generates significant liking without too much painful wanting might get better recommendations. However, this is a bad explanation because (1) it's probably too big a leap for evolution to generate a separate liking system just for this, (2) while you can choose not to start smoking, you can't choose not to start eating, and (3) liking evolved before elaborate social-recommendation systems did. (Of course, even plants have social-communication mechanisms, but I don't think they tell each other whether they're going to like -- or just want without liking -- a given experience. I don't think plants have liking or wanting or experiences in the sense discussed here.)

one way to conceive of hedonic happiness is as ‘liking’ without ‘wanting. That is, a state of pleasure without disruptive desires, a state of contentment (Kringelbach and Berridge 2009). A different possibility is that moderate ‘wanting’, matched to positive ‘liking’, facilitates engagement with the world. A little incentive salience may add zest to the perception of life and perhaps even promote the construction of meaning, just as in some patients therapeutic deep brain stimulation may help lift the veil of depression by making life events more appealing. However, too much ‘wanting’ can readily spiral into maladaptive patterns such as addiction, and is a direct route to great unhappiness.

Agree. I think I fall into the camp of preferring liking without any wanting, personally. Unsatisfied wanting is not fun (hence Buddhism, etc.).

Speculative but interesting:

The proposed link to subjective hedonic processing might make the orbitofrontal cortex an important gateway for neuroscientific analyses of human subjective conscious experience. Some have even suggested that the orbitofrontal and anterior cingulate cortices together could be viewed as part of a global workspace for access to consciousness with the specific role of evaluating the affective valence of stimuli (Dehaene et al. 1998; Kringelbach and Berridge 2010). In this context, it is interesting that the medial parts of the orbitofrontal are part of a proposed network for the baseline activity of the human brain at rest (Gusnard et al. 2001), as this would place the orbitofrontal cortex as a key node in the network subserving consciousness. This could potentially explain why all our subjective experiences have an emotional tone and perhaps even why we have conscious pleasure.

But note also:

Thus positive hedonia does not seem abolished by medial prefrontal or orbitofrontal cortex lesions, no matter what deficits in judgment and decision making do result. Such considerations suggest that orbitofrontal cortex might be more important to translating hedonic information into cognitive representations and decisions than to generating a core ‘liking’ reaction to pleasant events (Burke et al. 2010; Dickinson and Balleine 2010). [...] most anhedonic patients with schizophrenia or depression still give essentially normal hedonic ratings to the taste of sucrose (even if they have slight intensity impairments) (Berlin et al. 1998). Instead, the person retains core pleasures yet no longer seems to cognitively value those pleasures in their life as they once did. The sub-components of pleasure means that clinical anhedonia may be the outcome of a rather complex breakdown of cognitive construal about underlying wanting, liking and learning processes, rather than a simple loss of ‘liked’ pleasures themselves [...].

Interesting piece. Filed away to read properly later. Meanwhile.

Alan Dawrst wrote:On eudaimonia:

Conceptually, hedonic processing and eudaimonic meaningfulness are very different from each other. Yet, empirically, in real people well-being has been found to involve both together. High questionnaire scores for hedonia and eudaimonia typically converge in the same happy individual (Diener et al. 2008; Kuppens et al. 2008).

My sense is that people value complexity for its own sake; thus when I say to them '"happiness" needn't be a single type of experience so much as a conceptual spectrum for hedonic util to work', they still raise things like pain asymbolia and addiction as 'objections' to it. So I have a nagging feeling that if someone were to prove that what surveys separate into 'feeling happy' and 'feeling eudaimonic' are more or less equivalent, people would simply create a new arbitrary category and state that it's equivalently important. There's almost no end of happiness-like nouns for them to retreat to in order to absorb cogsci funding - welfare, wellbeing, dignity, serenity, etc.

Wanting without liking:

What could such reward electrodes or mesolimbic dopamine activations be doing, if not causing pleasure? One possible explanation is that they promote ‘wanting’ without ‘liking’.

I don't understand (and none of the Less Wrong posts I've seen seem to help) what 'wanting' is supposed to mean without involving liking. I can understand it as the subset or consequence of the latter (esp if the latter includes disliking), but if there's no feeling behind it, ‘wanting’ seems to be a nonsensical notion. Without a preferential emotion, anything within the light cone of any action could be seen as a ‘goal’.

The one nonsentient 'goal' all objects have, reliably and in common, is entropy. So any non-emotion-based goal-maximising preference utilitarian should seek an entropic shockwave. They should get along well with negative utils...

Arepo wrote:So I have a nagging feeling that if someone were to prove that what surveys separate into 'feeling happy' and 'feeling eudaimonic' are more or less equivalent, people would simply create a new arbitrary category and state that it's equivalently important.

Yes. Many people maintain an intuition that base pleasures are different from higher pleasures somehow, so even if the difference turns out not to be what they thought it was, then they'll come up with an alternate distinction. However, there might be some shift in their core intuitions as well.

In a similar fashion, people try to maintain a moral distinction between human and animal suffering even after they learn that humans don't have God-given souls and that Homo sapiens evolved in the same way as other species. However, the speciesist intuition can be weakened in some people by these realizations.

Arepo wrote:I don't understand (and none of the Less Wrong posts I've seen seem to help) what 'wanting' is supposed to mean without involving liking.

I may be mistaken, but I think "wanting" is when you're aroused to seek after something, but before you actually get it. For example, when you're hungry, you want food. Once you eat, you stop wanting the food and (usually) you like it. Often you can want something without really liking it, e.g., you can want to urinate, but you probably don't find the experience especially enjoyable (in the sense of providing pleasure, though it may relieve discomfort).

Arepo wrote:Without a preferential emotion, anything within the light cone of any action could be seen as a ‘goal’.

I think there is a distinct "feeling of what it's like" to want something. It's different from the feeling of enjoying something. As mentioned above, one example might be the feeling of looking for a toilet.

Alan Dawrst wrote:I may be mistaken, but I think "wanting" is when you're aroused to seek after something, but before you actually get it. For example, when you're hungry, you want food. Once you eat, you stop wanting the food and (usually) you like it. Often you can want something without really liking it, e.g., you can want to urinate, but you probably don't find the experience especially enjoyable (in the sense of providing pleasure, though it may relieve discomfort).

I think there is a distinct "feeling of what it's like" to want something. It's different from the feeling of enjoying something. As mentioned above, one example might be the feeling of looking for a toilet.

This just seems like displacing the question to 'seeking'. It still doesn't explain why I should care about, to use the classic example, a cold person who asks me to turn up the heating but not care about a thermostat.

The emotion associated might well be basically negative, eg wanting the toilet, craving a drug etc, but that doesn't mean it's not emotive. Saying that it feels different from simply liking (say) the sensation of the sun on your skin and therefore can't be associated with the same scale seems like committing the same sort of fallacy I described above - failing to allow that different sensations could still be comparable on an abstracted scale.

Arepo wrote:The emotion associated might well be basically negative, eg wanting the toilet, craving a drug etc, but that doesn't mean it's not emotive.

Yes, exactly. It's a distinct feeling from, say, the pain of having your skin burned, but it is an emotion with (probably negative) valence. (Second Noble Truth -- "suffering is caused by desire" -- and all that.)

Arepo wrote:Saying that it feels different from simply liking (say) the sensation of the sun on your skin and therefore can't be associated with the same scale seems like committing the same sort of fallacy I described above - failing to allow that different sensations could still be comparable on an abstracted scale.

Agree. I don't think anyone claimed they couldn't be compared.

Alan Dawrst wrote:(Second Noble Truth -- "suffering is caused by desire" -- and all that.)

I think this sentiment is the wrong way round. One can have emotion but no desire, but not desire and no emotion.

I'm no Buddhism expert, but my assumption is that it means, "desire causes/is associated with an unpleasant emotion." So there's emotion whether you're wanting or not.

You can Google this phrase: "Wanting without liking is hell. Liking without wanting is heaven."

Brilliant post, Brian! I'll have to read it more slowly later.

I've been reading Buddha's Brain. They mentioned that "craving" is the root of suffering, not "desire". They distinguish "craving" from "desire" by defining "craving" as a desire that leads to suffering if unfulfilled. Unfulfilled "desire" does not necessarily produce suffering.

Thanks, rory_rocket.

rory_rocket wrote:They distinguish "craving" from "desire" by defining "craving" as a desire that leads to suffering if unfulfilled.

Yes, that's a good choice of words to distinguish the two cases.

I'd say that your desires are what you act to accomplish, and your happiness is how much your desires shift towards your beliefs.

For example, suppose you buy a meal at a restaurant, then never buy the meal again.

You didn't buy the meal because eating it makes you happy. That wouldn't even mean anything, since you weren't eating it at the time. You attempted to eat it. You valued plans that resulted in you eating it. Eating it is a positive on your utility function. You desired to eat it.

After eating it, you no longer attempted to eat it. Your desire to eat it went away. Since this happened while eating it, you disliked it.

It might be that happiness is more your desires times your beliefs. If you end up with no desire to eat the meal, then that means you're neither happy nor unhappy. If your desire stayed the same, that would mean you're happy.

I think more resources need to be marshaled in favor of figuring out what exactly this "happiness" / "well-being" / "flourishing" is that we're supposed to be maximizing. We sure can last on the intuitive level for now, but when we start wanting to engineer utopias / create utilitronium / wirehead everyone, we'll definitely need to narrow it down. And I think it would help for sorting out differences (or the definitive lack of significant ones) between humans and nonhumans.

DanielLC, what you describe parallels reward-prediction error by the dopamine system. See, e.g., "A Neural Substrate of Prediction and Reward." However, I think this isn't all there is to pleasure, or perhaps even most of what there is to pleasure. As Berridge and Kringelbach say in the paper of the opening post, dopamine is for wanting, and other brain regions entirely are for liking. Often it will be true that getting more reward than expected will be a pleasant experience, but my understanding is that this needn't always be the case.

I agree with Peter's comments that studying pleasure is pretty important. Let's keep up the kinds of work that Berridge and Kringelbach reviewed in this piece.