USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20010907.1726 (On Screen): Sean wonders about the philosophical "problem of pleasure" for atheists. In a "in a world of randomness and meaninglessness", why is it that some of what we do is fun? He equates it with the philosophical problem of pain for Christians. That latter is indeed a problem: if the universe were created by a loving God, why is it that such horrible things happen to people who don't deserve it? Why does a cyclone in the Indian ocean drown 400,000 people in Bangladesh? Why does a volcanic eruption in the Caribbean kill a thousand people? Surely they weren't all sinners. Indeed, that is a real problem for Christians who believe that God is directly controlling everything (as opposed to Deists), and the best answer anyone has ever really come up for it is a feeble one in the Book of Job, more or less "Who are you to question God? What makes you think you could understand His motives?" It would be nice if I could at least make a tentative stab and understanding. In the mean time, it seems more to me like that great atheist Mark Twain got the right answer:

"If one truly believes in an all-powerful deity, and one looks around at the condition of the universe, one is drawn inescapably to the conclusion that God is a malign thug."

But the "problem of pleasure" for a mechanist isn't a problem at all. It's completely explicable, and in fact it would be very surprising to a mechanist if there were no pleasure or fun or joy. We enjoy things because creatures who enjoy the right things are differentially better adapted to survive and breed. It's as simple as that.

The most obvious example of that is sex. People who are driven to have sex a lot are more likely to create offspring than those who are not. (I think that is apparent.) Whatever it was that drove them to have sex will thus be passed on disproportionately to the next generation, if it was indeed genetically controlled. Do that for a thousand generations and nearly everyone within that breeding pool will inherit whatever it was. But "having sex" is a very complex thing in creatures with brains like ours (or even in brains like those in crocodiles), and whatever it is that drives them to have sex is also going to have to be in the brain since it requires complex behavior and cognition. It happens to be the case that it is enjoyable -- but that isn't the only way we're motivated.

We're driven to seek out pleasure but we're also driven by pain, or rather by the avoidance of pain. Pain is common enough for children that they rapidly learn what not to do. We are careful to not injure ourselves or do things which have a high chance of injury because we know that doing so is going to hurt like mad.

Sometimes both pleasure and pain drive us in the same direction. Eating is such a case; it's clear that creatures who don't care about food are less likely to survive than those who are driven to make sure they get an adequate diet, and again they are more likely to pass on their genes to the next generation. Not eating is unpleasant and physically painful; hunger drives us to eat. But eating a bland and unvarying diet is neither painful nor pleasurable -- "bread and water" is a sentence to boredom, not to suffering. Pleasure causes us to seek out a varied diet, because a varied diet is more healthy for us than a bland uniform one. Humans who eat only one thing will suffer from dietary deficiencies.

But it wouldn't be appropriate to use pain to drive a creature to seek sex, because pain is debilitating and the opportunity to have sex routinely isn't going to exist. Pain is used to drive things which are important every hour or every day, while pleasure is used to drive things which are important over the long run but which aren't urgent on a day-to-day basis. Pain drives us to eat every day, while pleasure drives us to seek out a varied diet over the long run. We don't have to eat a varied diet every day (the FDA notwithstanding) but if we eat a confined diet for years we're going to get sick from scurvy or rickets or any of a number of other diseases like that.

A guy who is doubled-over from blue balls is likely to be more susceptible to predators, which would decrease his chances of passing on his genes. (If he gets eaten by a lion before breeding, his genes stop with him.) So there is a certain amount of unpleasantness to not having sex ("Damn am I horny!") but not to the point of actually being physically painful. It makes more sense to motivate a creature to have sex by making it pleasurable, when combined with a general drive in the brain to seek out pleasurable activities. Sex is critical over the long run but not critical day-to-day, which means it is better motivated by pleasure than by pain.

Of course, the ability of genes to control how brains develop is less than you might think. Our genes don't contain a blueprint for the brain's wiring; the process is much more complicated than that and the actual kind of information transcribed in our genes can't control it that closely (let alone hold that much information at all; the genome is huge but not THAT huge). In order for us to enjoy sex (or a varied diet) we have to have the generalized ability to enjoy -- which is to say that we have to have a pleasure center in our brain, some circuit which, when tickled (no matter how) causes the brain to say "I like that; let's do it again." That is, in fact, what the pleasu