RE: Objective vs Subjective Morals
April 25, 2014 at 1:51 pm
(This post was last modified: April 25, 2014 at 1:58 pm by Coffee Jesus.)
(April 25, 2014 at 12:53 am)max-greece Wrote:(April 25, 2014 at 12:44 am)Coffee Jesus Wrote: I don't think bliss can coincide with boredom.
Yet we have established that is can coincide with pain. Interesting huh....
I don't know how a masochist feels engaged in BDSM. I don't know whether they feel bliss.
Getting technical, I prefer the terms "value" and "disvalue" over pleasure and pain. "Pain" has a narrower meaning when it's used to mean "physical pain".
If I may make your argument for you:
Physical pain is something that most people assume to be inherently disvaluable... until they learn of masochism. Our inability to distinguish disvalue from something that it's clearly distinct from suggests that we don't know what disvalue really is, in which case disvalue is not a suitable foundation for any form of knowledge.
Hmm, impressive argument.
However, I pose the hypothesis that masochists only enjoy the physical pain as a means to some other aspect of mental experience. If this is the case, there should be a limit on useful pain (see marginal utility), beyond which the pain is no longer desirable. Furthermore, if pain is inherently disvaluable, they should become bothered by the pain once it exceeds this limit.
Wikipedia - Masochism
"Many people with masochistic feelings do not really want to be hurt badly. They want to act out their daydreams, such as being tied up and kidnapped, or becoming the slave of another person. In BDSM, people often agree who will be "top" and "bottom" before they do anything together, and talk about exactly what they will do before they do it. People who do this kind of masochism usually do it for sexual excitement."
It's not surprising that valuable and disvaluable states can coincide given that many mental functions are reducible to simpler mental functions that can operate independently, as with split-brain or blind-sight patients.