noahfor

Ok. Why is pain bad? Why is happiness good? What are we using to judge these perceptions?

:::OshnSoul:::

I observe the issue of judgements and how everyone has a slightly, if not drastically, different take on what's good and what's bad. We are used to it, that is how we, as humans, have been brought up. I have swayed myself from using judgements and boundaries of good and bad. And, I've noticed that, if everyone does not share the exact same ideas and opinions on good and bad, then how do we really know what is good or bad? Same with religion, and how different religions define what is right and good, and what is bad and wrong. All religions are different, but they all exist for the same purpose- truth and spirituality. We all have one thing in common, and that is freedom of choice, and the yearning of our spirituality and knowing who we are and our purpose in life.
So I see there being no necessity for definitions of good and bad, but the fact that if i come across an experience or interaction in which someone else says or does something that I wouldn't do, I see it as defining me more- showing me what does and doesn't work for me, personally, but that I won't judge or ridicule those who do or say what I wouldn't.
If we accept others and events which are not like us, then we realize more about ourselves. If we ignore or critisize others and events which are not like us, we tend to focus on that too much, and we won't realize as much about ourselves.

Rodney

Ask yourself if we could live without pain, literally. You might hurt yourself and not even know it, then let the wound fester and eventually lose the limb. This sort of things happens to people with Hansen's Disease (leprosy), which decreases sensation in the limbs.

Somebody once said, "Pain is the great teacher of mankind, beneath its breath souls develop." I personally have had problems in my life that I have not wanted to confront until I was forced to by the pain they caused. And when I did face them, the pain stopped and my life proceeded. Pain can be a motivator to do that which we must but do not want to.

Pain is a necessary part of life. Taking actions to cause other people pain unnecessarily _is_ bad, especially if done particularly for your own gratification or gain. You deny their humanity by ignoring the pain you cause them.

Xell101

Simply put, pain is your body's very own blinking red light. You always pay attention to the blinking red light. Just as hapiness is worth attaining again, and again, and again, and again...

wilbjammin

I would say that "I do"... but that's not fair.

You do.


Though don't take all of the credit, I'm sure you've had some help in the matter along the way. Maybe even too much help...

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Innominate.

noahfor

I know why pain exists. I mean the perception. Why is the feeling itself bad? What tells us it is bad? Pain was just an example. Pinch yourself. Why is that a bad feeling and not a good one? Not why is there a bad feeling, but why is that bad feeling bad?

NoSoup

Actually, I have pondered this as well. Something that would be very, very interesting to do, (although inhumane) is to train a baby that pain is a good thing. I am curious if pain can be recognized as just a sensation (I'm chilly, it's humid outside) and not have negative connotations attached. What if one were to pinch or burn a newborn infant (I feel terrible just typing that) and instill a positive reaction (smiling, laughing, etc) with each time, just like when a child learns wrong from right.

I would be very curious if one could just recognize pain as a sensation, but not be bothered enough by it to react.

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I have an aura of reliability and good judgement.

Just in case you were wondering...

Yakk

Associating pain in certain contexts with pleasure isn't all that hard. There are entire subcultures that are into that sort of thing.

Dispite that, I think pain is more than just a random sensation: (most of) our brains are hard wired to treat that sensation in special ways.

Of course, another problem with attempting NoSoup's experiment is that pain causing actions tend to be damaging. If you where to burn someone, even lightly, often enough to condition them into viewing pain as a normal sensation, you'd probably end up with a dead experimentee.

You can train rats to treat other experiences somewhat like pain. Basically, you stick wires into their brain, and trigger "avoidance" centres in their brain, teaching the rat to avoid certain behaviour. You can do the same with "reinforcement" centres: possibly with a bit of brain surgury, you could remove the pain->avoidance connection?

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Last edited by JHVH : 10-29-4004 BC at 09:00 PM. Reason: Time for a rest.

Manic_Skafe

I believe that everything is a matter of perspective.

If you weren't put into the position you're in you'd view things completely different, you wouldn't be you, and so your view of what is real, true...etc. is different.

Social influence coupled with an innumerable amount of factors create us into who we are - giving us completely different points of view and completely different views of what is true. Regardless of what is viewed to be true it is still the direct result of an those innumerable factors that are beyond our control and so there is no one universal truth but only perspective truth.

Pain along with everything else is all a matter of perception and perception along with everything else is all a matter of perspective...etc.

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"Porn is a zoo of exotic animals that becomes boring upon ownership." -Nersesian

asaris

I'm not entirely opposed to certain forms of ethical relativism, since I don't believe that our 'natures' dictate any specific form of morality. Nevertheless, it seems to me to be self-evident that any moral theory which does not allow me to say "The actions of Pol Pot were morally wrong" has to be false.

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"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

Manic_Skafe

Well even if you believed in that form of ethical relativism you could view the actions of a person to be right or wrong. The glue that holds the idea together lies in the idea that although you may view something to be true that doesn't make it any more true than anyone else's view of what is right or wrong.

I don't like the taste of raw carrots but that doesn't mean that raw carrots taste bad - I just don't like the taste.

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"Porn is a zoo of exotic animals that becomes boring upon ownership." -Nersesian

asaris

Okay, I think I see what you're trying to get at, Manic, but correct me if I'm getting it wrong. You're NOT saying that there is no ethical truth, since ethical truth is by definition prescriptive (i.e., by saying something is good, I'm saying that people should do that thing), and you say that it's valid for me to say that other people's actions are wrong. But you are saying that we can't KNOW what is right and wrong. Now, to some extent I agree with this position -- there are certainly cases where reasonable people can disagree. For example, while I believe that killing in self-defense is wrong, I have more than enough doubts in this belief of mine, so that I wouldn't advise someone to seek forgiveness if they had done so. This is just basic epistemic humility. But where I disagree is in the thought that ALL ethical truths are like this. Certainly we know that the killing of an innocent arbitrarily is wrong, just like we know that 2 + 2 = 4 is true. And just like with math, the fact that we need to be taught ethical truths is no evidence that they are just a matter of taste. We need to be taught math as well, but I've never seen someone arguing a bill on the principle "Well, that's just YOUR math."

And while we're on taste. I've noticed that alot of otherwise reasonable people tend to think that taste is purely subjective. What I find 'beautiful' is just my opinion, and there are no objective grounds for finding it so. (Let me note that by beautiful here I just mean 'aesthetically good'.) I don't think this is true. There's a distinction to be drawn here. Let me use anime as an example, since I'm more familiar with that than other forms of art. My favorite anime series is Martian Successor Nadesico, and I've yet to see the anime that I enjoy more than that one. Yet, I recognize that there is anime that is, objectively, more beautiful than Nadesico; Boogiepop Phantom, for example. So, while to some extent our judgments of art are subjective, with some thought and self-distancing we can also recognize objective value in art.

To conclude, of course one's belief that something is true doesn't make it true. But that's just a confused argument for relativism. In fact, constructivist forms of relativism would hold just the opposite, that believing (or perceiving) something to be true makes it true, and that's WHY there is relativism. The fact that my beliefs don't affect reality seems to me to be powerful evidence for the fact that there is reality, in the ethical and aesthetic spheres no less than in the epistemic sphere, independent from me and so objective.

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"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

la petite moi

Happiness is something we feel when endorphins make us feel an ecstatic high, if you wanna say.

Pain is something we feel when nerves are triggered and the 'pain' is felt by our brain.

Manic_Skafe

Well the average person wouldn't even consider murder because they were conditioned to believe that murder is wrong. Even the average murder considers murder to be wrong.

I'm just saying that coming from another point of view, anything is a go. If I were conditioned to believe that murdering new born babies was good for preventing hair loss then I'd do it if I were balding.

From the smallest differences to what are believed to be universally known truths, they're all just the result of social conditioning.

But I'm no door to door faith salesman so I'll press this issue no further than this - that is unless you want me to.

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"Porn is a zoo of exotic animals that becomes boring upon ownership." -Nersesian

asaris

Oh, I enjoy arguing. See, I'm in the unenviable position of thinking that what I believe is true, and that's it's good to believe what's true, so I tend to convince people I'm right.

So you're position is that morality is merely a matter of social conditioning? Okay, but what's your argument? What makes you think that's the case? We tend to believe that morality is something more than just a personal preference -- is this also social conditioning? And if it's all social conditioning, how did it get started?

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"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

ARTelevision

There are some biological imperatives that are not generally amenable to socio-cultural programming - especially the ground-level examples in the thread starter. It's a bit of a pointless exercise to try to fool Mother Nature...

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gondath

Some so-called moral behavior is genetic rather than social programmed. For instance, we are more likely to protect our own children than someone else's because they share our genes. All humans tend to have this trait as a whole. Social programming still does have a lot to do with behavior though.

asaris

That doesn't answer my question, gondath. If you say its just genetically programmed, then you're inserting moral activity into the causal stream, with no way of distinguishing between moral and non-moral activity.

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"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

gondath

My comment was to say it has to do with both biology and modified behavior based on the environment. This has always been the case for every living creature. To which degree both have an effect, is still up for debate.

noahfor

We are definitely not just taught to think pain is bad and happiness is good. I mean we learn by being rewarded with positive feeling or saved from negatives feelings, or being punished by having positive feelings taken away or being subjected to negative feelings, so how can we be taught how to think of feelings. The body might be able to be taught to conjure up other feelings in place of pain when pain would normally be experienced. For instance pain killers actually change the perception of pain, but the feeling itself I can't see ever being good. I mean the definition of bad could be based on that feeling.

I think feelings are just absolutely good or bad, and even though I'm a strict non believer in anything that doesn't have to do with the physical world I can't see how a feeling can just be bad. I don't know. I'm bad at explaining things, but if anyone else has thought about it before and gets where I'm coming from I'd like some help. I can imagine how consciousness is a product of the physical world sort of, but when one is conscious of something that has a meaning (like bad), and the meaning just comes from nothing, just the essence of the feeling. It seems like a mystery.

asaris

Gondath -- if all morality is comes from biology and the environment, then there is no difference between someone who steps on our toe intentionally and someone who does so by accident. Both are acting under the influence of forces beyond their control. So why do we blame the one and not the other?

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"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

thespian86

Well, when your body is tired, in pain ect ect it becomes weak, making it bad. Happiness, pleasure, makes us pumped, emotionaly and physicaly making it good.

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nothingx

Blah. True Good and True Evil don't exist. They're not real.

To see this for yourself, you must suppose that something which is Good can not also be Evil. If stealing someone's hard earned money is an Evil thing, and giving money to the poor is a Good thing, then Robin Hood is a paradox. Since we have arrived at a contradiction we know that our supposition is false, and Good is also Evil. In the same way, pain is also pleasure and hot is also cold. It's all realative to the observer.

There is no universal defintion of right and wrong. What makes something right to you, could be wrong to someone else.

Consider the town of Erewon... every day the people of Erewon go to the town square where they beat and torture a boy tied up in the basement. The people laugh and have a great time terrorizing this kid. To them, it brings them great happiness and is Good. To you, this probably seems Evil.

noahfor

Well I do not see how pain could ever be good. Some people "enjoy" pain, but I don't know the whole story on that. Do they perceive pain differently, or does that perception of pain cause some other feeling to arise which is good. I would assume that if you lit someone who enjoys pain on fire they would stop enjoying it real quick. There are instances where things that people think are evil are good for some people, but I'm talking about feelings because they seem like the special case where they are absolutely good or bad. That is why I am talking about them specifically, and not stealing or beating people.

Also, if true good or bad do not exist then why do the ideas exist, they must be coming from somewhere. Everyone knows what good and bad are because we are subjected to true good and bad everyday in the form of feelings.

nothingx

Oh, absoluetely. They come from the mind. They're purely human made up notions. Just like the color 'red'. What you see as red, may be what I see as blue.... and an infinate spectrum of different shades of red will also be called 'red' because that's what we, as humans, do. We categorize things and make them simpiler so we can understand and think about them more easily.

Do they? Do you know everyone? Or do you know a subset of everyone? I assume, by everyone, you mean your society... and of course you and the society you belong to would have similar concepts of good and evil, but they cannot be universalized. It just doesn't work.

noahfor

I'm not saying everyone knows what is good and bad, but everyone knows what the idea of good and bad are.

:::OshnSoul:::

It's what we've been programmed to believe. It's an automatic reflex of the mind to judge what is "good" and what is "bad" but that all things are given labels and judgements through individual opinions, beliefs, and experiences. Sometimes people just say something is "bad", "good", or "evil" even if they haven't experienced it first-hand.
It's all relative.

tiberry

Bad=Something or someone that exists outside our personal (subjective) boundaries of things that are "good". As :::OshnSoul::: said - its all relative to the observer.

NOTHING, and I do mean NOTHING is inherently "bad"...how could it be? Who is the single, impartial, objective judge as to what's "good" and "bad"? God? That's opening a whole new thread just to address that issue!

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My life's work is to bridge the gap between that which is perceived by the mind and that which is quantifiable by words and numbers.

noahfor

No, that's not a whole new thread. I started this thread to address that issue. Pain to me seems have an inherant badness, and I wanted to know what makes it bad. Like you said, who is the judge? When I feel pain there is only that perception, me being conscious of the feeling, nothing more, but it being bad is something more than just a feeling. Where does the badness come from. If you don't think pain is bad then you are feeling something else. Consciousnesses don't differ. What we experience might.

Or if you want to do it this way. Let's assume the badness of pain is subjective. Who decided it would feel so horrible for you, and I'm not talking about why pain is bad, I'm talking about what makes the feeling bad. Are we making a choice to feel it as being bad, and it's just a neutral feeling to begin with? Also, let's just assume that everyone is feeling the same thing, just for the sake of conversation, because when I say pain I mean the feeling that I am feeling, and we might not all be feeling the same thing I admit. If I stab myself and feel like I'm having an orgasm, that's not pain, that's just the nervous system being screwed up.

Does anyone get me? If pain isn't just inherantly bad then each of us must be deciding that it is bad, and how do you decide the goodness or badness of a feeling? Doesn't it seem strange that feeling JUST ARE bad or good for you?

:::OshnSoul:::

there's a difference here I'd like to point out. Pain is.......well, painful.........it hurts.........but that does not make it bad, necessarily. Just because it hurts doesn't mean it has to be "bad".
What about those who *like* pain or just don't mind it (at least to a degree)? Does that mean they are wrong for not thinking it's "bad"? What about those in other countries or even in our own who practice rituals and such that involve pain, but to them- in their mindset, it does not hurt- their frame of mind is not focused on the pain at all, therefore they don't even think about it being bad at all. Not everyone believes the same thing- even when it comes to pain being bad. Any adjective is created by man, just as every other word in the world. But adjectives are what? They are simply judgements. Labels to categorize something. For instance, noahfor, feelings aren't good or bad- they simply are feelings. But then our human reaction is to decipher and label that feeling as good or bad.

noahfor

Well by bad I don't mean morally bad. When I say bad I mean the same as hurts, what makes it hurt, why is that feeling hurt. Pain doesn't hurt, it is hurt.

gondath

I don't think there is a definite answer for this question yet. Maybe some doctors and psychologists could collaborate on a major study here. I certainly think it has enough relevant applications to make it worthwhile.

duckznutz

Q1 Pain = bad?
there is often a fine line between pleasure and pain . . . in fact they often switch over (check the Wayside Forum for examples!).

It is all just electrical impulses reaching the brain. The perception of these impulses is rooted in evolution (as has been previously stated in this thread) eg. you withdraw your hand from a flame to prevent burning . . mother nature always assumes control when you are being an idiot . . . . try suffocating yourself . . . . mother nature sighs at your idiocy and steps in to render you unconscious so you fall down and release your grip.
Pain sensation is hard-wired . . .you can 'overcome' it and suffer it to a degree but by and large you dont get to choose whats sore and whats not. So the answer to Q1 is that pain is not 'bad' but an innate response to direct animals from hurting themselves. Pain works at the sub-conscious level . . .the concept of 'bad' is a relative one which inhabits the world of conscious thought. Nothing is 'bad' when you are asleep!

Q2 happiness = good?
First of all we have to distinguish between happiness and pleasure. Pleasure is flip-side of the coin that is pain in that it is hard-wired by mother nature. We all enjoy food and sex and scratching the itch. Although it doesnt take long to realise that there is no real pleasure as such . . . its all just relief from pain. We eat to remove hunger pangs, we scratch to relieve the irritation of an itch . . . we eat, sleep, exercise, defecate, bathe, sneeze and cough to relieve discomfort. Maybe sex is a 'positive' pleasure? But personally I think it is chemically biologically driven . . . .after every pleasure we always feel 'relaxed'. We have returned to the 'normal' state free of pain. Therefore pleasure is simply 'absence of pain'.

Happiness. An abstract concept entirely relative to your situation. In surveys, when questioned, 99% of people said they would be more than happy if they were paid 30% more . . . . . . . until six months later when you could ask them the same question again.

My personal theory is that happiness is not experienced . . . . . it is remembered. the holiday seems more fun looking at the photographs than it did at the time . . . .

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Where your talents and the needs of the world cross . . there lies your vocation.

fairsquare

"There ain't no good and there ain't no bad. There's just stuff people do." -- Grapes of Wrath

So, Here is my take. What is good and what is bad...

We humans have hard wired genetic imperitives that will have a greater (but not 100%) tendency for a society to accept or reject certain acts. For example, in all societies on this planet, there are taboos against having sex with your brother or sister. This is not to say that it isn't possible that someone might get a kick out of such a thing, it only sez that it had enough dna thrown at it that it will show up as a trait in society.

To put it another way, If you took 10 human beings and erased their minds and put them on a desert island, they in the course of several centuries would develop a society and this society would most definatly have some "rule" or "feeling" about sex with mom not being a generally good idea. (Of course you alway will have one or 2 who will get a kick out of it, but it is the exception)

Thats as close as you get to a NON-RELATIVISTIC Morality.

But, its pretty much a fair playing ground as to what we will deam appropriate after that...

Think of this analogy.... Our genes are complex enough that every human being looks different from one another(representing the vast number of interpretations of good and bad), but we still all have arms and legs and two eyes, and a nose... (and every once in a while one of us is born without an arm or a leg)

oh, so to answer the question, Pain is genetically wired in and society will always adopt it in the BAD category, even if we would start all over with a brainless band of islanders..

noahfor

I think alot of you are missing what I'm asking, which is my fault. I'm not asking about anything other than the feeling. I'm not asking why we evolved to feel pain, or how we learn to feel pain. I'm not really even talking about pain specifically.

When something has meaning that means there is more to it than just the thing. Pain is just a feeling, but the fact that it hurts is meaning, but then there is nothing more than just the feeling, so how can it have meaning. It's like a contradiction: there is more to it than just a feeling, but then at the same time there isn't. The same goes for all feelings. I know it's a terrible stab at what I'm really trying to say, but it's all I can muster.

Think about this. When something happens to you, you judge its good or badness by the way it makes you feel (and forget what good and bad are, and that it might not be that way all the time). Something else tells us what is bad or good about a situation, and that is feeling, but what tells you if feelings are good or bad?

:::OshnSoul:::

I've learned not to judge any situation that comes my way because I know it happened for a reason, and there is always "goodness" to it- even if it may be hard to see at the time. I do realize my feelings toward the situation, but value those feelings without judging and move on. Judging doesn't help anything- discovering your place in the situation and knowing that soon you will see the reason will help you see things of yourself that you didn't know existed.

serenity

I think you need to be more specific about what this "more to it than just the thing" actually is. My thinking is that meaning arises because a consciousness is applied to an observation. In other words, something that can recognize, remember, and break into patterns is applied to perception. The meaning of a thing, is the interaction between conception and sense. Something that has meaning, has to have meaning for someone. I don't think meaning just exists out of thin air. So this extra you're looking for, may just be the person experiencing the thing.

I think you tell you. If you can use feeling to judge a situation. Then you can probably treat the feeling as another situation, and see what "feeling" you get from that. Your self-consciousness is reflexive, meaning it can observe itself. This is introspection, and I don't think there's any limit to how many "meta" levels you can go to. (How do I feel about this? How do I feel about feeling like this? ...). I hope this added something new to the discussion.