[3] It is closely related to value, desire and action:[4] humans and other conscious animals find pleasure enjoyable, positive or worthy of seeking.
A great variety of activities may be experienced as pleasurable, like eating, having sex, listening to music or playing games.
This assumption is important for the possibility of comparing and aggregating the degrees of pleasure of different experiences, for example, in order to perform the Utilitarian calculus.
[10][6] But there may be other things besides or instead of pleasure that constitute well-being, like health, virtue, knowledge or the fulfillment of desires.
[citation needed] Many pleasurable experiences are associated with satisfying basic biological drives, such as eating, exercise, hygiene, sleep, and sex.
[12] Pleasure may come from the enjoyment of food, sex, sports, seeing a beautiful sunset or engaging in an intellectually satisfying activity.
According to this approach, pleasurable experiences differ in content (drinking a milkshake, playing chess) but agree in feeling or hedonic tone.
[7] This approach captures the intuition that a second person may have exactly the same taste-experience but not enjoy it since the relevant attitude is lacking.
[22][18] But this version faces a related problem akin to the Euthyphro dilemma: it seems that we usually desire things because they are enjoyable, not the other way round.
Ethical hedonism takes the strongest position on this relation in stating that considerations of increasing pleasure and decreasing pain fully determine what we should do or which action is right.
Within this family, classical utilitarianism draws the closest connection between pleasure and right action by holding that the agent should maximize the sum-total of everyone's happiness.
Qualitative hedonists, following John Stuart Mill, object to this version on the grounds that it threatens to turn axiological hedonism into a "philosophy of swine".
[34] For example, a cold jaded critic may still be a good judge of beauty due to her years of experience but lack the joy that initially accompanied her work.
[45] In the 12th century, Razi's Treatise of the Self and the Spirit (Kitab al Nafs Wa’l Ruh) analyzed different types of pleasure- sensuous and intellectual, and explained their relations with one another.
[48] Yet, some lines of research suggest that people do experience pleasure and suffering at the same time, giving rise to so-called mixed feelings.
[52] The clinical condition of being unable to experience pleasure from usually enjoyable activities is called anhedonia.
The degree to which something or someone is experienced as pleasurable not only depends on its objective attributes (appearance, sound, taste, texture, etc.
), but on beliefs about its history, about the circumstances of its creation, about its rarity, fame, or price, and on other non-intrinsic attributes, such as the social status or identity it conveys.
The thesis of psychological hedonism generalizes this insight by holding that all our actions aim at increasing pleasure and avoiding pain.
It states that there is a strong, inborn tendency of our mental life to seek immediate gratification whenever an opportunity presents itself.
[2] This tendency is opposed by the reality principle, which constitutes a learned capacity to delay immediate gratification in order to take the real consequences of our actions into account.
[58] A cognitive bias is a systematic tendency of thinking and judging in a way that deviates from a normative criterion, especially from the demands of rationality.
It states that our overall impression of past events is determined for the most part not by the total pleasure and suffering it contained but by how it felt at its peaks and at its end.
[60] For example, the memory of a painful colonoscopy is improved if the examination is extended by three minutes in which the scope is still inside but not moved anymore, resulting in a moderately uncomfortable sensation.
This principle states that the temporal location of a benefit or a harm is not important for its normative significance: a rational agent should care to the same extent about all parts of their life.
[67][68][65] The future bias refers to our tendency to violate temporal neutrality in regards to the direction of time.
[69] In other words, extrinsic rewards function as motivational magnets that elicit "wanting", but not "liking" reactions once they have been acquired.
In rats, microinjections of opioids, endocannabinoids, and orexin are capable of enhancing liking reactions in these hotspots.
[12] Some research indicates that similar mesocorticolimbic circuitry is activated by quite diverse pleasures, suggesting a common neural currency.
[74] Some commentators opine that our current understanding of how pleasure happens within us remains poor,[75][76] but that scientific advance gives optimism for future progress.