Posts by Elayne

This is my outline so far for a book for parents, combining my professional knowledge about child development ( I am a pediatrician) and behavior with EP. I will likely not write chapters in order but will post as I go and then eventually have a full book done. I am very interested in hearing member stories about how they have applied EP to interactions with their children-- I plan to include stories from my own experience as examples of different points. This outline has some technical jargon in it for conciseness, but I will write in a conversational tone.

I would like your comments on the general proposed organization of information and suggestions for any key topic I may be omitting. Thanks!

I. Basic overview of EP, including physics, the Canon, and ethics-- fairly brief and I will probably write this part last

II. Physics (in which I will include relevant biological research, which is ultimately physics)

A. Material nature of the universe and of biological beings

. B. Brief overview of developmental human behaviors and evolutionary pressures-- genetics, epigenetics, environmental influences, timing of skill development, empathy, temperament, etc-- nature/ nurture. Parent nurture influence is a small part of the total environmental influence on adult behavioral outcomes, but we do have influence.

C. Evidence for prolepses-- humans not "blank slates"

D. Research on decision making/ choice and how humans participate in shaping the environment including culture. Include decision fatigue. The process of choice is not an illusion.

III. How children perceive reality and how to provide effective support as a parent

A. Sensory-motor development, effective ways to stimulate

B. Pain and Pleasure

1. Pain-- intrinsic vs extrinsic, pitfalls of behavioral modification (children are not like lab rats), role of pain as a vital warning system, how children express physical/ emotional pain and the temperament variations

2. Pleasure-- intrinsic pleasure, pitfalls of extrinsic rewards, individual variations, shared pleasure

C. Prolepses -- more details about some specific hereditary human cognitions such as innate recognition of justice

D. Development of abstract reasoning and common childhood errors in interpreting their experiences. Human cognitive heuristics. The use and precautions of reasoning as a tool.

IV. Ethics in child raising

A. Setting an example through living a pleasant life yourself, demonstrating honesty, trustworthiness, justice, kindness, friendship, wise judgment/ planning-- "show your work" to child so they understand what you are doing and why

B. Teaching wise judgment and decision making for net pleasure in developmentally appropriate ways

C. Making proxy decisions for a child's net pleasure, until child old enough to do so for themselves-- based on adult knowledge, experience, and observation of your child's individual temperament and preferences. Includes using evidence to make wise healthcare decisions for your child. Importance of maintaining your child's future freedom of choice.

D. Increasing shared pleasure in the family through activities and happy memories, building family relationships over time

E. Teaching children about common pitfalls in competing/ popular philosophies and how to recognize subtle variations-- stoicism, Buddhism, Humanism, various social utilitarianisms-- ists and isms, lol

F. Helping your child learn to evaluate potential friendships and skills to nurture true friendships and to recognize and leave situations where they are being treated badly-- social skills

G. Providing effective feedback to help your child learn from mistakes-- communication with children

H. Transitioning over time to a position of providing wisdom from experience and gradually releasing active decision making to children and teen, in age appropriate ways.

V. Raising children without supernatural beliefs in a supernaturalist society-- challenges and tips. Children's developmentally expected fears. How to discuss death with children.

VI. Summary-- raising children as part of a pleasant life, enjoying your relationship with your grown children, transmission of wisdom from one generation to the next. Since this is aimed at parents it won't have a section on enjoying not having children, although I certainly think this is a wise decision for some people!

Hiram, not speaking French, I don't have the same access to Michael Onfray's work-- but I found this article by him which seems to be a different perspective than Epicurean. His hedonism is a "balance" between pleasure for oneself and others. If he does that, then he has caused balance to be more important or as important as pleasure. Then he talks about the universal things he believes, including some abstract quality of "worth" of different humans.

I definitely take a lot of pleasure in witnessing the pleasure of those I love, so it is included already in my own pleasure-- it isn't a separate thing that needs to be balanced. And I don't even assign "worth" to humans at all. That's an abstract concept which eventually results in the turning of humans into math problems, and then the math becomes more important than the actual pleasure.

Onfray says a happy human is "better" than an unhappy human- what does he mean by better? Is there a "better" that is different from pleasure? If he said "I am happier being around happy humans than unhappy humans" or "I am happier living around other people for whom pleasure is the goal" it would make more sense. That would be something I could agree with.

I make this comment because if he is a central figure representing Epicurus in France, his version sounds significantly different from the direction we are going here.

https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0…78eng.pdf.multi

Hiram, right, I do not mean an external object but a molecule that mimics our endogenous pleasure pathways-- which could give us pleasure despite actual danger. This is more similar to someone's brain being directly stimulated with electric current to create pleasure-- it does not give us the usual information about whether the action is likely safe.I would limit unnatural to synthetically produced mimics, such as fentanyl, but the word unnatural is tricky and I rarely use it. But I think it is safe to say that since fentanyl has not been around long, we can't have adjusted to it through evolution. There is a generation right now being exposed to massive use of synthetic opiates by their parents, and a dramatic increase in overdose deaths in the past few years in the US, often by young adults. The grandparents are raising these children-- I have many in my practice. I'm expecting a cultural aversion to synthetic mimics of the opiate pathway in that generation, which is being left orphaned-- once they are of age.

I am contrasting something like fentanyl's mimicking action with, for instance, a sweet pleasurable taste tending to indicate that a fruit is less likely poisonous-- in which case the brain is producing the evolved pleasure response. There is a definite difference between those two events in the brain, as well as in outcomes for the person.

As far as addiction goes, of course I have assisted in the treatment of teens, since that is part of pediatric practice, and for that reason I have done a fair amount of research. I think the evidence is most supportive of a process like the one Stanton Peele outlines. I have had several conversations with Stanton on the subject, and I had the pleasure of reviewing an advance copy of his book on developmental aspects of addiction, which is coming out in May. The general gist is that people do not become addicted when they are enjoying pleasure through their innate pleasure pathways-- they tend to have no interest in the mimics, or if they do use them, they do so without becoming addicted. https://peele.net/

The thing that convinces me of the anticipations is developmental pediatric research-- the fact that we are not blank slates. We have a rudimentary "sense of justice" based on the tit for tat scheme, and several other innate intuitions which are either present in infancy or emerge as if on a schedule, in a variety of environments.

I have decided the best word for me to describe these brain functions is as being like senses. That is what they seem closest to, but instead of being sights and sounds, they are innate intuitions. People know what we are talking about if we say a "sense of justice." We have more senses than had been understood in Epicurus' time-- we have senses which were then subsumed under touch, such as temperature and vibration. We have proprioception to know where our body parts are with our eyes closed, a sense of balance (lol, some of us-- me not so much), and a sense of acceleration (we cannot detect constant speed, however). There is some recent convincing evidence that humans, like some other animals, have a sense of magnetic fields! I have seen some research on the sensation of "knowing something", which can be stimulated in the brain completely unattached to content. There is a sense of the familiar and the unfamiliar, and although the familiar usually (except with deja vu) requires prior exposure to a setting, that does not explain the sense itself-- anymore than having seen red once explains color vision after that. And maybe we have an innate preference for reality.

The innate intuitions like the sense of justice are different enough from vision and hearing to be put in their own category. They are not based on reasoning and/or experience. I suppose someone could lump them in together with the other senses, but they do need to be accounted for in the ways humans interact with reality, somewhere in the Canon.

Cassius, that is exactly the track I am on with this, and your phrase "disposition to embrace reality"-- that's the short version to encapsulate my long explanation.

I thought it was worth talking about because I haven't seen us address it directly, when it comes to seeking pleasures. It doesn't change pleasure being pleasure but it could explain some intuitive aversions.

A specific example-- if a person takes a powerful artificially manufactured extrinsic pleasure mediator, like fentanyl, they can put their hand on a hot stove and burn themselves while feeling no pain. Reality would have provided the signal of pain to prevent tissue damage. But the person has "fought against their sensations" by introducing a molecule that binds unnaturally to the endorphin receptors and now has no way to judge reality.

Cassius, yes, I should have been more clear. I mean two distinct ideas-- the "higher and lower", as you say-- there is no distinction. And then the intrinsic pathways of pleasure vs the extrinsically mediated pathways-- I am tempted to call these natural vs unnatural, but that might be a stretch. There seems to me a definite difference between our pleasure systems responding to reality vs a molecule bypassing part of the intrinsic pathway to mimic our innate pleasure systems.

For the substance- mediated pleasure which sort of "hijacks" our innate pleasure pathways-- bypassing the ordinary workings of these feelings--I do not mean that the pleasure itself is differently felt, but I am wondering if the frequent sense of hesitation many people feel about these pleasures is because of an intuitive apprehension that there will be net pain. It may be a learned apprehension from having seen people go down the road of addiction, but I am not fully sure that is all that is going on. With all the sense-altering plants in the world, that would be a constant danger if humans (and other animals) had to use reasoning every time to decide about them. Generally, instead, humans use the substances but have built up all sorts of rituals and prohibitions about them.

So I am wondering if we have an intuition, an anticipation/prolepsis to be cautious with what Elli called the "fantastic", when we were talking about someone lying on the beach forever with margaritas, in altering our sensory input. I am not calling this a different type of pleasure, in the felt sense. But like justice, I wonder if we are innately suspicious. Animals that make themselves intoxicated frequently would not survive to reproduce-- they would fall, be unaware of predators, etc. Loss of contact with reality is precarious. Humans can reason this out-- we can do hedonic calculus-- but that might be too fancy of a skill to have been present early in evolution.

Even lab rats will skip extrinsic mediators like cocaine and opiates if they are having pleasure from a natural environment. Even if they haven't experienced addiction and withdrawal pains. I don't think they are reasoning this out.

In that thought experiment asking people if they would chose the completely blissful simulated life vs the real life, I think this is behind an intuitive preference for the real vs the unreal. The unreal feels intuitively unsafe.

The closest I can come to finding a PD that would support this is PD 23:

" If you fight against all your sensations, you will have no standard to which to refer, and thus no means of judging even those sensations which you claim are false."

The extrinsic mimics of our pleasure pathways "fight against" our sensations, in a way, by rendering them unreliable as signals about reality. Sometimes only with the pleasure pathways and sometimes including our sense organs as well.

We have had several threads lately on FB addressing the principle that pleasure is pleasure-- no higher or lower pleasures. There is still often some contrast made between pleasures which involve altered states, such as through drugs or foods-- the use of extrinsic molecules which bind to receptors which otherwise bind our own endogenously produced neurotransmitters. I would like to consider this from a slightly different angle, while maintaining still that pleasure is pleasure.

The contrast in comfort level with feelings of pleasure mediated by intrinsic neurologic/ hormonal pathways and those mediated by extrinsic factors may be based on an intuition that the extrinsic pathways are not credible contacts with reality. I'm saying intuition here because I don't get the sense that it is a reasoning process-- it seems like a visceral distrust. Perhaps a prolepsis?

The extrinsic molecules bind differently from our intrinsic molecules-- often more "tightly", less reversibly. They can result in down-regulation of our receptors, a hallmark of tolerance which happens in addiction. To my knowledge, feelings of pain and pleasure produced by unaltered contact with reality do not have this effect at the molecular level. We can become habituated to smells, so that we only notice a new smell after some time of contact with a particular odor, but we do not down regulate our ability to feel pleasure at a new, pleasant smell. We may become habituated to a particular pleasure without losing responsiveness to a new one. Whereas with extrinsic mimics, we can, if addicted, temporarily lose access to normal pleasure entirely.

Perhaps we have an intuitive sense of caution around extrinsic mimics of our pleasure pathways. From an evolutionary standpoint, this would make sense, because pleasures and pains are signposts about reality-- they tell us what will help and hurt us. If we alter our senses of sight, touch, hearing, smell, and taste so that we do not contact reality in the way we have evolved to do, this can be unsafe-- and in the same way, altering our ability to get feedback from reality-based pains and pleasures could be dangerous.

I have taken courses in medical hypnosis, which can be very useful for reducing both chronic and acute pain without medication side effects. I have mostly used it for patients with migraines and "functional" abdominal pain, where the pain is not serving a useful purpose as a warning. I've occasionally used it for acute pain, such as for a little boy whose mother brought him to my office unexpectedly with a serious, obvious broken arm. While splinting him and contacting ortho for an emergency appointment, I quickly used hypnosis to resolve his severe pain and panic.

However, a key element of medical hypnosis is always the suggestion to never remove ALL the pain and to never remove pain that has not yet been diagnosed-- because then we have removed a critical warning system for tissue damage. We do not want people self-hypnotizing away their appendicitis pain. It should really be used very very selectively.

I am wary of extrinsic molecular mimics of my pleasure pathways, as well as other practices which could alter my normal contact with reality-- such as trying to lose my spontaneous emotional response to painful or pleasurable events-- a goal of certain meditation practices. While maintaining that pleasure is pleasure, net pain can result from losing our usual contact with Nature.

Quote from Rivelle

Yes, Rivelle, I agree with Bradley, -- I am concerned about your use above of "the True and the Good"-- and would add that the human being is nothing but a corporeal subject. Our bodies aren't just ever-present in our lives-- we are literally our bodies. There is no such thing as "true pleasure"- -vs "untrue pleasure"-- all pleasure is pleasure, but some brings pain along with it, and if the net result is pain? That is something to avoid.

What is pleasure for you vs pain and for me-- those things can vary. But the underlying goal of pleasure should not vary, if we are both practicing Epicurean Philosophy.

I say that in the spirit of friendship, because I do not want you to miss out on the full benefit of the Philosophy, for your overall happiness.

But I can get on with things this way because I have already dealt with the major issues that give people anxiety. I was raised atheist, so I never had to worry about the whole afterlife/ punishment thing. I am 55 and have already learned that certain things like status are not worth the aggravation. I was raised by scientists-- a physicist and a mathematician-- who taught me the importance of evidence (the senses), and I learned to seek pleasure and to notice feelings of pleasure and pain on my own from life experiences, trial and error. I never did go with the popular modern idea that pain was just an interpretation of events-- from medical training, I know it is actually a critical signal of damage or impending damage and not to ignore it-- it is a message about reality!

I think my somewhat hard-headed nature about all this, not going with popular opinion but trusting my own analysis, has been an advantage.

My practices are:

1) Writing out a rough daily schedule/ to do list and in writing it consider "what will be the outcome for me if I do this, or don't do it?" I make sure at the beginning of the day that my goal remains pleasure. I have learned not to put too many things on my list, because leaving breaks between actions is pleasurable for me. This is when I check to see if I need to do any long term planning also.

My example list for today includes: coffee (which I roast myself so it tastes great for low cost), cheese/fruit and enjoy the view from my deck while waking up all the way; read (this morning I read some from the book Joyful, and I caught up on some medical journals-- the act of reading has always been very pleasurable for me, and I get information I can apply for future pleasures); write condolence cards to two friends who have had deaths in their families; do some research for a friend who has been diagnosed with cancer; take a brisk 1 hr walk outside before it rains, noticing the daily changes in spring flowers and leaves, which causes me pleasure at the time and later in terms of good health; catch up on FB and Epicurean friends; do 4 hrs of telemedicine, with breaks to stretch my legs-- this I mostly enjoy because I like talking to parents and solving problems, plus it pays for my housing and food; do some cleaning/ straightening while dancing around/ singing; practice my part for an upcoming Chorus concert; make dinner for a friend who is coming to my place for dinner and a movie tonight. This weekend I will have a busy schedule with two Chorus events, hanging out with the atheists for coffee, and having my family over Sunday afternoon as usual for "dinner" and conversation-- and hugs. At the end of the day, I remember what I have enjoyed that day and from past days, so I go to sleep happy.

2) Habitually noticing and savoring pleasures, and if pain comes up-- including anxiety, grief, anger-- taking time to figure out what I need to do to fix it.

The body has natural endocannabinoids which are part of the end pathway of pleasure, from any source. Anandamide binds to those receptors, but the endocannabinoid receptors are possibly the most numerous in the body of any neurotransmitter receptor.

The issue with plant molecules mimicking our own neurotransmitters is complicated-- in some cases, it may be to the evolutionary advantage of the plant to get us hooked on it and spread the plant's seeds. There can be recreational uses but also significant medical uses. For instance, CBD oil has been used successfully to treat seizures that didn't respond to any other treatment (Cannabidiol, a cannabinoid).

We have opiate-like molecules in other foods-- like casomorphine in milk and opiate like effects of wheat-- but in such small amounts that one would not feel high. Possibly enough to contribute to wanting to eat those foods again.

The most reliable path to activating our natural endocannabinoids is through pleasure, not through becoming dependent on a particular substance-- for most of us. For some people who are deficient in natural endocannabinoids, cannabis may turn out to be important, similar to using antidepressants-- but that is medical.

One problem with all external sources of these pleasure neurotransmitters is that if one habitually uses them, the body starts to down-regulate its own production and also sometimes its receptors. Then when you stop-- misery!

On the gut-- the gut has an extensive neural network and communicates with the brain closely. The brain is strongly affected by the microbiome. I tend to think of the entire nervous system as being basically part of the brain.

https://askthescientists.com/gut-brain/

I am reading it right now, because I am smack in the middle of the Bible Belt in Alabama, and the newly deconverted/ new atheists like to talk about things like this. I figure that knowing some of the possibilities is a good conversation starter for them and then --- hahaha-- I will bring on Epicurus!

Elli, yes, there is a molecular basis to pleasure (and pain), and the molecules you mention are the final common pathway in a range of initial causes. For instance, hypothyroidism can result in depression/ loss of pleasure, and it is treated by giving the patient thyroid hormone. Heart disease can cause depression, as well as multiple brain disorders such as multiple sclerosis. The old division between psychiatry and neurology is false and probably needs to be removed. For instance, there is evidence for multiple factors in schizophrenia, including inflammation in the brain as a cause! I have seen some early research proposing to use anti-inflammatory agents developed for multiple sclerosis-- to treat schizophrenia. The brain is so fascinating.

We evolved to have social pains as a warning maybe the group was going to reject us, which would be dangerous to early humans-- emotional pain can sometimes be relieved with a regular pain reliever like ibuprofen!

One very important thing to remember is that the effectiveness of a treatment does not prove the original cause. For instance, strep throat is not a penicillin shortage and a broken leg is not a cast shortage. So some cases of lost pleasure can be treated with therapy, but that doesn't mean the cause was not biological. And some social injury loss of pleasure can be treated with medication.

And yes, Cassius, I think it is important that if people have loss of pleasure, they should see a physician for a thorough evaluation. Loss of ability to feel pleasure is a different thing from not currently getting a lot of pleasure. If someone still is able to feel pleasure, and has no other symptoms of depression, they may just need to plan their lives more effectively. But if they can't feel it even with an activity that used to create pleasure, this means something medical is going on-- depression or something else.

That is one of the things I do in my work-- I make sure to do a very thorough history and exam for my patients with mood symptoms. I have seen far too many children who were diagnosed with depression or the like and what they really had was something else, like sleep apnea. Once we fix the underlying problem, they can enjoy life-- then the thing to do is make sure to plan for pleasure!

Cassius, that throws a completely different light on it! How interesting. If so, that would help with one thing I thought of today on a 3 hr round trip drive to a meeting, about what appears to be a specificity of pleasures.

My thought was-- Epicurus gave specific pleasures to remove specific pains. For instance, PD 2 is to remove the pain of anxiety about death, which allows pleasure in living; PD 6 is to encourage planning for one's safety, with the pleasure of feeling safe; PD 35 advises us to avoid secretly breaking the law to avoid future pain, etc.

Epicurus does not say things like "go ahead and break the law because you can always eat cake later and the taste pleasure will cancel out your worries" or "if you are cold, remember your past pleasures."

The only case I can think of where the recommended action was not specific was at his death. If he had morphine, I feel like he would have used it. Since he could not directly remove the pain, he focused on pleasant memories instead, a wise move.

However, if the pleasure from tasting cake was as intense as the pleasure from escaping death, as long lasting as the knowledge of peace and safety, and could also be spread over the whole body including the amygdala, then eating cake (or whatever else is easy) would be the only thing one ever needed to do.

So if he was really emphasizing that it won't work like that, this would encourage people to be specific with their pleasures for removing and preventing pain.

This is not like what I see people do around me. They do thi:s "I'm worried about my job so I'll go shopping."

Thanks, Hiram, the fatigue/ finite physical energy is huge-- not sure why I didn't think of that, but definitely needs to be part of the limit on intensity-- and fits with the idea of condensed being an event per time based thing, at the molecular level. It's not a limit on the fullness of pleasure but on the intensity.

The issue of Harris and free will-- I think this is a very hard concept to explain, but we do need to keep in mind that there is not sentient being with agency which is other than "merely the processes in the brain and the body that produce pleasure." The decisional capacity itself is one of those brain processes. An important process but not separate. I don't fault Harris for having trouble with this-- not sure if I can do any better-- because our language really gets in the way. What he is arguing against is something people think they believe in but which is entirely impossible. The type of free will most people believe in would require a ghost in a machine-- a separate soul which is somehow a free agent in regards to the brain and the body.

I have had some success explaining it in this way: when I was born, I made no decisions about my DNA, mitochondria, parents, social environment, etc. My beginnings had no agency of mine involved whatsoever. (Of course, you know many people think otherwise). As long as I am talking to atheists, I think there is not going to be argument against this point.

If we say that I did not create myself with agency, at some time there must have been a first actual decision I made-- a movement of an arm or a leg, for instance. That decision, that agency, could only have been produced by a brain I had no decisional input into creating. So that first decision, although made by me and not by my mother, was 100% dependent upon decisions not made by me. It was not "free" in that sense. From the moment of conception, the components/ function of my brain are affected by everything in the environment-- foods, the weather, other people, viruses, etc. My brain is also affected by each decision I make. It is still me making that decision, not my mother, the weather, etc. So I clearly have agency. But at no point does there exist a homunculus inside of me which can be traced back to anything other than the total interactions of my starting material and my environment. The self which makes each decision is not constructed by anything which has become independent/ free-floating in regards to the starting material and the subsequent environment. The environment includes "the swerve", but we also do not create "the swerve"-- if we did, it would not be a swerve at all but also a product of us plus the environment.

Those who believe in the supernatural are imagining a separate spiritual being which can override the biological being, and that's how they imagine free will. Some of them imagine sort of free spirit that emerges from inert matter-- but what would have gone into producing the characteristics of that emergent free spirit, if not the starting material plus the environment? I don't see how that would work.

Some people feel like this means we aren't making decisions, and that doesn't make sense. We are certainly deciding. Harris knows that but spends more time on how the "we" which decides gets formed. I may have done no better, above, but that is my go at it.

There are some neurologic correlates at least to persistence of pleasure, once initiated-- there is reason to believe these are two separate things, pleasure and having it last. This is from research on anhedonia, where researchers found the difference in anhedonia vs normal pleasure was NOT that there was no pleasure in anhedonia but that it did not persist as long. I have to look that up too. It has to do with signaling from the PFC. It's a neurologic after-glow sort of thing.

This could be a different concept though, from static and kinetic-- more to do with the initiation and extension of pleasure. DeWitt said that static pleasure was what helped Epicurus argue for the possibility of continual pleasure-- but extended duration of pleasure after an initiating action (including a thought) might work just as well or better. If we had to take constant action, every minute, to enjoy ourselves, that might be hard to sustain. Let down your guard for an instant and poof! That's not how it feels though-- it feels like there is a lingering effect which agrees with the anhedonia research. Then all you have to do for sustained pleasure is boost it as needed and also plan for the future.

On to the second conclusion of DeWitt, that intensity goes with kinetic pleasure and less intensity with static pleasure, my personal experience does not fully agree. There are plenty of kinetic, active pleasures which are wonderful but not intense, such as taking a walk on a Spring day. There are static pleasures, such as the afterglow from sex, which is not more intense than orgasm but is more intense than the pleasure of a nice walk—and the afterglow is not active. I am not actively thinking or doing anything during that time to produce it. It is literally an abundance of neurotransmitters produced by the orgasm which are still flooding my body. There is an afterglow of actions like having given a gift to one of my children that they really liked—I am not doing anything particular to ramp that up, but it is a warm happy feeling that persists for quite some time. There is the static pleasure which persists after having thought about the fact that I am fed, warm, safe, dry and have friends, which lasts beyond the time when I am actively thinking about it. This is all due to neurotransmitter effects, nothing mysterious. But I do not find that activity and intensity are tightly bound in my experience, when comparing one pleasure to another.

However, I can make a definite case for the static component of a particular kinetic pleasure being less intense, which would match the typical pattern of neurotransmitter action. Is this possibly what DeWitt is referring to?

I cannot think of any static pleasure which was not initiated by a kinetic one, kinetic including a thought or a perceptible bodily action. Can you?

A few loose ends

I have some cautions to suggest in evaluating intensity and kinetic pleasure vs static. I notice that some people make the mistake of guessing the intensity of a pleasure from the stimulus or from the person’s outward expression. We know from temperament research (need citations) that one person may feel a given stimulus much more intensely than another. We also know that outward expression of felt intensity may vary widely from one person to another. Someone can feel intensely angry, for instance, and have a guarded poker face. Another person may not feel intensely angry but can be in the habit of using vigorous body language associated with anger. I would avoid guessing the subjective intensity whenever it is possible to ask the person involved. If time-based condensation of pleasure holds up at the neurotransmitter level—more hits in a shorter time = more intensity—then it is only at that level where we might be able to predict intensity from the objective position.

The same is true for kinetic vs static. A person can be moving around but be mainly feeling static pleasure from a prior kinetic pleasure. A person can be lying in a hammock and actively producing pleasure by thinking of happy memories.

From the Letter to Menoeceus, we have “When we are pained because of the absence of pleasure, then, and then only, do we feel the need of pleasure.” So, how does the person who has learned to prolong static pleasure become motivated to get off the sofa? One who has already studied enough science to be entirely free of fears of the unreal? If they are not feeling pain, where is the desire going to come from, to change positions? This is when planning is also very important, because staying on the sofa all day in a state of bliss is not likely to lead to long term pleasure. For long term pleasure of the body, some exercise is needed (insert quote from Jefferson talking to his friend). For long term friendship one must get off the sofa and be with friends. Similarly, one must usually act to have income for food, shelter, and other needs. There is nothing wrong with prolonged static pleasure in itself, unless failing to intersperse kinetic pleasure will result in more pain later. The most pleasure producing mix of static and kinetic has to be determined on a case by case basis.

Now, how does intensity relate to fullness of pleasure? My experience is that intensity is not required for fullness of pleasure—only the absence of pain. Depending on how the neuro research goes, this could be me saying “even one endorphin-receptor interaction, in the absence of pain, registers as pleasure”, but I think it is more likely that we need a certain threshold level of pleasurable neurotransmitter activity going on or we will have pain. This suspicion is based on research I have seen and need to dig up about people who are deficient in endocannabinoid production, who tend to have pain but without obvious cause. Our bodies are undergoing internal movement and contact with the environment, and I suspect that our basic state would be pain if we had no pleasure processes at all going on. So the better wording would be “if there is exactly enough endorphin activity going on to counteract all the pain of the body, the result is pleasure. If there is only slightly less, the result is pain. There is no in between.” If I am correct, this would be biological evidence to support what Epicurus said about the impossibility of a neutral state. My experience already agrees with him.

There is an experiential difference between a less intense but still fully pleasurable sensation and an intense one, but it does not feel like a difference in completeness/ fullness of the pleasure cup. This is something I rely on others to know from experience, since I can’t prove it. I do not consider highly intense pleasure to be more or less preferable to less intense. The reason I know this is that if I am in a state of even mildly intense pleasure, sitting with friends after a satisfying meal, I have zero desire to jump up and bike down a nearby hill to increase my pleasure. (This is similar to what the “rat park” and related human studies have found about addiction—that neither rats nor humans are interested in drug-mediated pleasure if they are in an otherwise pleasant environment. It’s not really the substance itself that creates the addictions but the underlying lack of ordinary pleasures). Nor do I want to stop mid-hill on my bike so I can go have a less intense pleasure. Anyway, I would not call intensity an increase of pleasure, but it is nevertheless at least a characteristic of pleasure that it can be more or less intense.

The next thing I would say from personal experience is that highly intense pleasure-producing stimuli can become painful if prolonged, but I suggest this is NOT related to the pleasure itself—rather, I perceive that it is related to the intensity of the stimulation and/or the intense biological response to an intense stimulus. It is hard to sort these things out as they are experienced simultaneously, but that is my proposal. Being tickled very briefly can feel pleasurable, but if it goes on and on, it is too much and is no fun—in that case, the pleasure itself vanishes and the intense stimulus persists. If the pleasure I am feeling is internal ecstasy—when I was younger, although I didn’t experiment with drugs, I experimented with some bliss-promoting meditation practices—the biological demands on my body, including my brain, required to sustain that level of intensity can be exhausting and become uncomfortable. Even the sensation which one second ago felt blissful begins to feel like pain. However, I do not say it is the pleasure itself that causes this, but the intensity of biological response, because once a sensation becomes painful, it is not pleasurable by definition. I wonder what this would look like, at the molecular level in the brain—what changes, at that instant when a stimulus becomes painful? This type of intense pleasure can be followed by a “let-down” instead of an afterglow which I suspect is similar to coming down off an intoxicant. I found the aftermath of these meditation practices so unpleasant that I quit doing them years ago. I have wondered if internally stimulated intense pleasure can possibly have a similar effect to exogenous opiates—do the receptors down-regulate?

Another example of intensity would be pharmaceutical opiates, which bind to our endogenous receptors in a tighter manner than our own endorphins, stimulating us more intensely than we are biologically evolved to cope with, at least on an ongoing basis. In response, our bodies down-regulate the receptors, to escape the excessive stimulation. And then when the opiates are removed, that person for a time will have difficulty experiencing endogenous pleasure, because the receptors must recover first. Our bodies regulate intensity of response to a stimulus, to restore the homeostasis necessary for survival. ** I need to double check the research and add references for this section, since it is just what I remember reading.

In the psychiatric literature, an argument is made that we can have “too much pleasure” based on disorders such as mania in bipolar disease, where the extreme joy is not related to external stimuli but has become unhinged. I would say here they are really commenting on intensity, plus disconnection from reality. I think they are making an error to believe that what happens in a disease state refers to pleasure in the absence of such an illness—as if they are saying “don’t get too happy, or you might come down with bipolar mania and give away your car to a stranger in a fit of happiness.” We have no evidence to my knowledge that intense enjoyment causes bipolar disease. There are several possibilities for the cause of bipolar, one of the more interesting ones having to do with the multiple body “clocks”, various circadian rhythms, getting out of time with each other. But if intense neurotransmitter hits are unsafe for the body in some other way, the usual warning mechanism is pain. So I don’t think it is unreasonable to imagine that there is possibly a danger in highly intense/ condensed ordinarily pleasure-producing stimuli for prolonged periods, although the specifics of intensity thresholds and durations would likely vary from one individual to another, because there are a lot of genetic differences, such as at the receptor level.

I think this is important to clarify, because it is part of the fear of pleasure people have. If we can make it clear that the pleasure is not dangerous but that intense stimulation can sometimes have painful effects, we can encourage people to drop their worries that if they engage in pleasure all the time, they will be sorry later. There is still a natural limit to desire for intense stimuli, in that pain will begin when a stimulus is too intense for too long, for a given person.

There are some people who are biologically less responsive to a range of stimuli. It takes more to achieve the same internal response. These are people who like very hot pepper, sky diving, horror movies, etc. Some of them have to go very nearly to the point of escaping death on a regular basis before they are able to notice pleasure, and indeed many of them do die, such as with base jumping. Some of this can be combated by teaching them to slow down and pay attention to less intense pleasures, because it can partly be a habit—personal experience with patients. But there are actual genetic differences that seem to correlate with this as well. A lower responsiveness to stimuli can correlate with lower conscience and higher sociopathy. (** again, I need to supply references to medical literature for all these points).

The way in which I see Epicurus addressing this is simply with avoiding pleasures that bring along more pains. And that seems quite sufficient for me, but I also think that it would help reduce fears by specifically addressing stimulus/response intensity as an issue, with science-based correlates.

************************

Lacking further knowledge about additional words of Epicurus, I will now move on to my personal experience and medical research. DeWitt’s first conclusion, about intensity being related to timing, seems to hold up reasonably well on personal testing. If I do a number of pleasurable things in a short period, one after another, the sensation of pleasure I have is often more intense.

At first, however, I was not sure that simply more pleasures in a shorter time was the _only_ way to achieve intensity of pleasure. Examples of highly intense pleasure for me personally would include extremely palatable foods, orgasm, and thrilling physical sensations such as coasting down a steep hill on a bicycle. The speed, I supposed, could be considered a shortening of the pleasure duration of coasting down the hill, but I am not sure that is right, because just going very slowly down a hill does not provide me with any particular pleasure. DeWitt would have to say I am having pleasure but not noticing it, and then we are in the realm of fantasy. It’s also hard to see how to apply that to a bite of chocolate or orgasm—I don’t know how to make those less intense by slowing them down. On the contrary, both seem even more intense that way—eating slowly/ savoring, etc.

But... then I thought—what would be the underlying mechanism for condensing a pleasure into a shorter time period? Wouldn’t there have to be a brain activity going on? Pleasure isn’t a disembodied event—there is matter/energy and void only. Now I will need to look at neurotransmitter production, binding to receptors, and re-uptake to see if there is research on that related to qualitative intensity of pleasure. This is an area of neurology I have minimal knowledge about. I do know that it is possible to block the experience of pleasure with activities like sunbathing, by administering naloxone to block our opiate receptors. (If I recall correctly, the researchers used this to conclude that sunbathing was an addiction and therefore bad-- omg, really, people? An example of our societal fear of pleasure!) I do not know what has been done to find out how our brain achieves intensity of feeling. I think this will be important to understand what is happening with condensation of pleasure. If we can correlate feelings of pleasure intensity with something like number of hits of endorphins on our endogenous receptors per time period, that would fit perfectly with the idea that intensity is related to timing—not of the bike ride but of the brain events. An extended pleasure might be the same number of endorphin- receptor contacts but over a longer period of time. But this is entirely conjecture on my part, so far.

I also know there are proposed to be a number of different pleasure neurotransmitters—dopamine, serotonin, endorphins (there are several), oxytocin and endocannabinoids (our own internal cannabis). To back up the idea that pleasure is one category of thing, there needs to be some commonality of event going on in the brain, despite these different neurotransmitters, which is underlying pleasure. This could either be at the neurotransmitter level, such that one of the neurotransmitters is the “real” pleasure molecule, or something afterwards—some common effect of those neurotransmitters which is felt as pleasure. Otherwise I do not see how we can say that all pleasures are ultimately the same if equally intense (condensed)/ equally distributed in the body. Is there an alternative to thinking this way?

My guess is that endorphins are one key, because when these are blocked with naloxone, there is not pleasure, from what I’ve seen. I know that for me, when my daughter was an infant and I was on my newborn nursery rotation in medical school, hearing other babies cry would sometimes trigger an oxytocin mediated milk letdown—but this was not pleasurable, more so annoying, lol. So I don’t think oxytocin alone is sufficient for pleasure. I will see what I can find out in the neuropsych research. It’s quite possible we don’t know enough to say, yet. But if endorphins are what trigger the feeling of pleasure, it’s possible that actual biological event happening that corresponds with the feeling of pleasure is not the endorphins but the next step, when the endorphins bind the receptors and cause a cascade of events with ion channels. If there are convergent process of different neurotransmitters resulting in some common event, this would make sense—for such a critical process as pleasure, it seems unlikely that we would have no kind of backup systems.

I know there is a difference between the subjective feeling, the qualia, and the observable events of matter. However, in other cases, there is correlation—there are wavelengths of light perceived by us as red, subjectively. That is why I would expect a similar correlation in the brain when it comes to feelings of pleasure.

**********