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Drawing from science for a moment, all those chemicals in our brain that correspond to happiness and sadness exist representative of those emotions. As far as I know, happiness is not the absence of the sad brain fluid.
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Basically true, but on a mental/philosophic side I feel this is somewhat irrelevant. We are only capable of describing something in terms of what it isn't, because our language defines attributes as a large set of mutually opposing constructs. If you eliminate one side of a continuum, then the new end point becomes the point that you chose to cut off from.
This raises the point that I think Mantus made. If you get rid of the ability to feel pain, does that mean that you can no longer define both pain and pleasure, or does that mean you can still define pleasure even though you don't know pain?
Incidently, some people are actually born with a congenital defect that keeps them from feeling any sensation of pain (in about five minutes of Google searching, I couldn't find the name of this disorder, though I did stumble upon alifewithoutpain.com). You might think this is really cool, but it actually turns out to be extremely dangerous because those affected have no idea that when they should stop doing something to themselves.
Considering that this kind of defect exists, I imagine that it is possible to know pleasure without knowing pain. However, I imagine that their definition of pleasure is very different than what we define pleasure to be, since our abilities to feel pain and pleasure are intricately connected. If you get rid of one, the other still exists, but it's not the same as it was before.
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If someone is drugged with increasing amounts of dopamine their entire lives, are they not eternally happy?
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Well technically they're dead, but I think we know what you meant.
