On Pleasure

And Survival, Mangos and Hot Chocolate

Survival

Let’s talk about pleasure.

On the one hand, we all know how pleasure feels. Whether it is our favourite dessert. Or good news. Or meeting a long-lost friend after a long time. We all know the feeling.

On the other hand, can we describe it? What is pleasure? Is any one type of pleasure any different from any other?

The only thing I can say for sure about pleasure is that I want more of it.

And this is also how evolutionary psychologists define pleasure. Pleasure is an innate motivation that drives us to do things that are good for us. Where “good” means “characteristics that help us survive”. Hence, eating is pleasurable, because we need food. The same applies to sleep and sex.

Note, this is a very narrow definition of “good”. It is not innately good in any absolute sense. It merely helps us survive.

Also, “helps us survive” is only accurate in a broad, long-term context.

Mangos

Suppose a cave-person ancestor of ours encountered a tree full of mangos. Given that energy and nourishment were scarce, it would have been smart to devour as many mangos, before they rotted, or were eaten by monkeys.

Hence, eating Mangos was pleasurable. These days most foods (including mangos) are not scarce, and we don’t need to binge-eat all the time. However, the instinct to do so remains. Hence, the urge to decimate that tub of ice-cream in the fridge.

Hence, in the modern world, many definitions of “good” have done a U-turn. Food that is “good” for you is almost certainly not the most pleasurable food. Some nutritionists even recommend fasting — the ultimate “non-food” — as the best diet. The same applies to many other types of pleasure. What is most pleasurable is not what is “good” for us.

But there is a problem. We all want pleasure. It’s one of the few things that seem to bring meaning to our otherwise meaningless lives.

So what to do?

Let’s do some hypothetical fantasising. What if we could make eating an undressed salad as pleasurable as eating our favourite dessert? Or even better, what if fasting could be made as pleasurable?

Is this possible? To speculate, let’s analyse pleasure in more detail.

Hot Chocolate

Suppose we are drinking our favourite hot chocolate. Thick, bitter and sweet. When we taste the sugar and chocolate, and they hit our blood-stream, our bodies secrete various pleasure-inducing chemicals. This is the “pleasure” that we feel.

How do these chemicals work? We don’t know. What we feel is a complicated emergent effect caused by these chemicals. Which are themselves, quite complicated. An evolutionary biologist would describe this back to front.

It is not that these chemicals cause pleasure. It is that only the humans that felt the effect of the chemicals as pleasurable survived. The other humans, who didn’t find pleasure in sugar, sex, sleep, or chocolate, didn’t survive.

This is both shocking and liberating.

It is shocking because, pleasure, something we feel to be very real, is, at some deep level, not real. It is a sort of arbitrary choice. We, humans, have arbitrarily chosen to recognised somethings as pleasurable because it is good for survival.

But it is also liberating. Because if it is a choice, we can change our choice. We could choose not to see dessert as pleasurable. And choose to see undressed salad or fasting as pleasurable instead.

The question is, how.

How do we get to that deep level, where we choose between pleasure and non-pleasure?