Optimizing pleasure

[Anonymous No.5712123]

How could the scientific method be used to maximize pleasure in the universe systematically and on purpose?

Is there an approach that provably creates maximum pleasure per resource input, such as small brains consisting only of pleasure centers that are artificially stimulated?

[Anonymous No.5712145]

Isn't this the classical philosophy argument of "you can't have empirically good without something bad to compare it to". Wouldn't the brain need to consistently increase the amount of pleasure being outputted per input for this concept to work? Also, I'm not sure evolution would be in the favor of these modifications. Would an organism who is consistently pleased with everything it encounters be able to survive as well as one who wouldn't be?

[Anonymous No.5712152]

>>5712145
Well, evolution would surely be against pure pleasure brains. But maybe they could be created on purpose and maintained by technology.

Let's say we develop a cost-effective way to do this in the future. If we spend even a fraction of what we now spend on art and conspicuous symbolism, we could create a lot of pleasure outside of darwinian competition.

[Anonymous No.5712161]

>>5712123
coke

[Anonymous No.5712172]

>>5712161
You would need a way to make many new brains, keep them alive for a while while the coke has its effect, and then painlessly shut them down and replace them with more new brains.

With high energy efficiency.

[Anonymous No.5712180]

>>5712152

That's a pretty radical idea, but interesting nonetheless. This is a very logician/vulcan mindset (which I'm on board with, but many "art-y" type people would puke at the thought of it). Are you implying we could "substitute" the arts with biotech/bio-engineering? Maybe this is a derailed train of thought when considering the original topic in this thread, but I don't believe art is created purely pleasure, unless you're able to prove/rationalize the only reason people practice freedom of expression is to take pleasure away from it and for no other reason.

[Anonymous No.5712193]

>>5712180
>Are you implying we could "substitute" the arts with biotech/bio-engineering?
No. I mentioned art merely in contrast to the functional efficiency required by darwinian evolution. The point is that humans do many things that are not purely in the interest of functional darwinian efficiency. Art is one of these things, but creating energy-efficient pleasure minds on purpose could be another one.

You could imagine a charity doing this, or a political agenda setting doing it for ethical reasons, or wealthy private people cloning their own brains, or some other variety.

[Anonymous No.5713485]

Creating a future with far more pleasure than pain in it should be an ethical goal of humanity. A fraction of GDP should always be spent on efficient pleasure generation using the scientific method.

And then colonize the universe.

[Anonymous No.5713492]

>>5713485
compare today's leisure and diversions with 100 years ago

We are moving fucking fast, friend. Don't worry

[Anonymous No.5713503]

>>5713492
If the technology were there,
I would earn some extra money,
create cheap copies of my mind,
run them getting ultra-high,
shut them down again.

Could be really cheap too, a lot of what we spent are superfluous or fixed costs.

[Anonymous No.5713509]

>>5713503
be the change you want to see. This isn't cuba, put some elbow grease into it and start a firm

[Anonymous No.5713534]

>maximize pleasure

So, the rats that had electrodes plugged into their nucleus accumbens led fairly comatose lives because they were able to cause pleasure simply by pushing a lever. They had no need to run around their cages because they could just push the lever and receive far more pleasure than running could provide. Of course, the same applied to sex, food, water, and sleep so they ended up dying.

Pleasure is the way your brain decides which stimuli are biologically required for survival and causes behaviors to ensure that you get that stimuli again. You learn that food will make you not hungry because of all the behaviors that you can perform when you're hungry, eating is the only one that causes pleasure. The stronger the stimuli, the stronger the learned behavior. Amphetamine is incredibly addictive because it causes more stimulation in the nucleus accumbens then a person should naturally encounter. Addiction, by definition, is a behavior that supplants biological needs with artificial ones.

Maximizing pleasure would be pretty detrimental to vertebrates. Survival depends on pleasure being difficult to achieve.

[Anonymous No.5713548]

>>5713509
I'm not capable of running a firm or doing the research. But I still think the general idea has merit.

>>5713534
Yes, but the idea is that minds could be created and destroyed cheaply, and then you could maintain an artificially high pleasure state during this time, without any compensating suffering.

Also note that the rats may have been addicted without feeling much pleasure; if their desire pathways were short-circuited, they would have desired the stimulation without deriving pleasure from it (that's what addiction can become, when it turns into a joyless burden). This is obviously not ethically desirable.

[Anonymous No.5713552]

>>5713548
>Yes, but the idea is that minds could be created and destroyed cheaply
I know this may sound like vicitmization, but imagine you could clone yourself, get high, destroy the clone painlessly, use the biomatter to clone yourself again, get high...

I could run 20 clones blissed out just in my apartment here, using a bit more food and energy.

If you don't want to use drugs, use ordinary entertainment or sex. Not so bad either.

[Anonymous No.5713564]

Hmmm, this thread has me thinking about the process of downregulation and upregulation of the receptors in the brain. As far as I know, when certain neurotransmitters like serotonin are being flooded into the brain, through the use of MDMA or SSRI's for example, the brain actively downregulates the number of receptors in the brain-cells, and over time, depression and anxiety can occur.

My question is, if we can stop or at least halt the process of downregulation, could we theoretically have brains that could "be high" all the time? Is this an impossible task?

Another question: if feelings of euphoria, calm, ..., are as a result of electrical activity in the brain, can we experience pleasure without these neurotransmitters playing a central role? What I mean is, if I were to electrically stimulate the pleasure centers of your brain, you'd be feeling pleasure without the presence of serotonin, dopamine, etc being the cause. If that is the case, can we have neural pathways that create 'pleasure' without 'pleasure'-neurotransmitters having a central role?

[Anonymous No.5713567]

>>5713564
>Is this an impossible task?

yes

[Anonymous No.5713571]

>>5713564
I suspect that neurotransmitters are not needed as such for mental phenomena like pleasure, but they are deeply woven into the evolved implementation. This does not mean, however, that flooding the brain with neurotransmitter-affecting chemicals is the only way to influence these mental phenomena. You could imagine brain implants that work.

You could also hypothesize alternative implementations of the same informational pathways, such as digital brain emulations, or some other substrate change. It is conceivable that synaptic strengths could be artificially adjusted in such a system.

My prediction is that science will lead to more power of intelligent beings to literally "change their mind", by means of technologies of representation and manipulation of the underlying brain functions - like an "admin" account for your operating system.

[Anonymous No.5713578]

>>5713548

>the rats may have been addicted without feeling much pleasure

No no, silly. Stimulation of the nucleus accumbens is what pleasure is. They were feeling more pleasure then they knew what to do with, hence why they stopped needing to sleep/eat/drink/sex. The NA is easily fooled into activation because it's only a small cluster of neurons. It doesn't need to be sleep/eat/drink/sex, that's why we can get pleasure out of reading, listening to music, playing the vidya.

>>5713564

Ignore >>5713567 he's an idiot. Figuring out the biochemical pathway that controls receptor expression is complicated because there are any number of intermediaries between the protein and DNA. Gene expression is a big field of research and it's pretty new.

>"be high" all the time

No. Neuromodulators, particularly mono amines, are rapidly broken down by monoamine oxidase when they are release into the synaptic gap (not all of it is taken up by the afferent neuron). You have to synthesize new monoamines eventually and if you increase the rate of consumption by making action potential easier, you'll run out.

[Anonymous No.5713582]

>>5713578
>Stimulation of the nucleus accumbens is what pleasure is.
I don't think that's quite accurate actually, but I'm too lazy to dig up the literature.

The general point is that repetitive behavior doesn't have to be pleasurable, it could be compulsive or addictive, so looking at behavior alone isn't enough to judge subjective wellbeing.

As for the neurotransmitters, don't underestimate the potential for future technologies to affect them or implement the whole pathways in a different substrate.

[Anonymous No.5713589]

>>5712172
But coke is far from the most pleasurable drug

[Anonymous No.5713590]

>>5713571

>neurotransmitters are not needed

Yeah, they kind of are. How are you producing action potential anywhere in the CNS without neurotransmitters?

>synaptic strengths

You mean lowering the potential? Yeah, that's what electrodes in the brain do. The current in the electrode triggers the action potential instead of Ca. This is exactly what turned the rats into lever pushing zombies.

>manipulation of the underlying brain functions

Electra-convulsive therapy or transcranial magnetic stimulation. We've got it right now.

[Anonymous No.5713592]

>>5713564
That comic is actually sincere guys.

I shit you not.

[Anonymous No.5713595]

>>5713590
>How are you producing action potential anywhere in the CNS without neurotransmitters?
You could conceive of a system that implements the pathways without neurotransmitters, such as a digital emulation that represents the synapses algorithmically. Such a system could potentially feel pleasure without having actual neurotransmitters.

Obviously for current humans you do need neurotransmitters.

[neuroscience guy No.5713596]

>>5713564
The idea that dopamine is involved in hedonic processes has been discredited for more than decade. The role of dopamine in learning and reward is precisely my field. I've left a slightly tl;dr review for you guys.

https://www.lsa.umich.edu/psych/research&labs/berridge/publications/Berridge%202007%20Debate%20over%20dopamine%20-%20incentive%20salience%20Psychopharmacology.pdf

>>Stimulation of the nucleus accumbens is what pleasure is.

Accumbens is clearly involved but this statement is so unfounded I don't even know if it would be fair to call it an oversimplification. Also it would be helpful if you were to specify accumbens Core/medial shell/lateral shell since all three components have different connectivity (some parts of accumbens respond to both aversive and appetitive stimuli.)

I'll check on this thread tomorrow when I have to make an actual contribution.

[neuroscience guy No.5713606]

one more quick thing

>>5713590
>Yeah, they kind of are. How are you producing action potential anywhere in the CNS without neurotransmitters?

In most parts of the CNS, monoamines like dopamine function more like neuromodulators than neurotransmitters. This can be a touchy subject, but suffice to say that dopamine is generally neither excitatory nor inhibitory.

>You mean lowering the potential? Yeah, that's what electrodes in the brain do. The current in the electrode triggers the action potential instead of Ca. This is exactly what turned the rats into lever pushing zombies.

I'm nitpicking here: While there is such a thing as a calcium action potential, calcium does not generally trigger action potentials.

More importantly: Animals will lever press on different time scales for different reasons. As of yet unpublished evidence I am aware of suggests that selective stimulation of non-dopamine neurons in the VTA (one of the major sources of midbrain dopamine) will elicit lever pressing, but if you bring the animals back for a later test, they leave the lever alone. Dopamine seems to be critical for *long lasting* changes in the incentive properties of the lever.

[neuroscience guy No.5713608]

>>5713596
>I'll check on this thread tomorrow when I have TIME* to make an actual contribution.

[Anonymous No.5713615]

>>5713582

>repetitive behavior doesn't have to be pleasurable

You're right. Repetitive behavior isn't controlled by the nucleus accumbens, it's controlled elsewhere in the basal ganglia. Other parts of the basal ganglia, namely the striatum, receive inputs other than those from the dopaminergic pathway so the nucleus accumbens need not be enervated in producing repetative behavior. We know, however, that the NA is enervated when using drugs or an electrode because that's where all the stimulation is coming from. Amphetamine, in particular, targets the NA and leaves other dopamine receptors in the cortex alone.

When people say things like, this drug isnt even fun anymore but I have to keep taking it, it's because the rest of the limbic system is active but the NA is not. If the NA were active you wouldn't even notice the reward seeking behavior. Imagine the proverbial drug-fueled sex heart attack!

[Anonymous No.5713624]

>>5713578
In that case, pleasure can be entirely unpleasurable. Hell, you can even have pleasure without conscious entities. Just turn all available matter into maximally stimulated nucleos accumbenses without any of the rest of the brain. (or turn it into more efficient reductive simulations of the same). Oh what joy it would be to have such a universe, shame there would be no-one to observe it, let alone formulate the existence of pleasure.

[neuroscience guy No.5713627]

>>5713615
I guess I'm getting sucked in...

>Repetitive behavior isn't controlled by the nucleus accumbens, it's controlled elsewhere in the basal ganglia. Other parts of the basal ganglia, namely the striatum

THE ACCUMBENS IS THE VENTRAL PART OF THE STRIATUM. FYI: All parts of the striatum receive dopaminergic afferents (accumbens from VTA and dorsal striatum from substantia nigra pars compacta) and cortical and thalamic afferents (though the cortical afferents are from different places). Accumbens also receives a number of unique limbic afferents that have nothing to do with dopamine.

>Amphetamine, in particular, targets the NA and leaves other dopamine receptors in the cortex alone.

This is blatantly false. Amphetamine causes release of dopamine terminals wherever they are in the body.

[Anonymous No.5713628]

>Is there an approach that provably creates maximum pleasure per resource input
heroin

[Anonymous No.5713636]

Why has no one mentioned utilitarianism yet?

Is /sci/ really that retarded?

[Anonymous No.5713640]

>>5713636
Because utilitarianism as an ideology implies controversial conclusions that not everybody shares. Creating more pleasure than pain is a utilitarian idea, but it doesn't require accepting utilitarian decisions in all areas of life under any circumstances.

[Anonymous No.5713653]

>>5713640
That's no reason for not mentioning it.

It's about the closest extant philosophy to OP's.

[Anonymous No.5713655]

>>5713640
>Creating more pleasure than pain is a utilitarian idea
exactly

yet no one mentions it, even to crit

[Anonymous No.5713660]

It didn't seem to add anything to the discussion, and in my past experience, people jump to retarded pseudo-debates about trolley problems and non-sequitors about population ethics, and so on.

[Anonymous No.5713666]

>>5713660
well aren't you the shit

[Carbon !5XmfGkN7AQ No.5713697]

>>5712123
pleasure is the reason people are so unproductive on average nowadays

[Anonymous No.5713714]

>>5713697
You mean people have too many entertainment options and get too used to it to focus on career, family etc.?

I guess it's possible but I would point out that a part of the problem is a lack of vision.

When I look at politics, I see little consensus to reduce suffering and increase pleasure in the world, as a goal of politics. They allow a lot of torture (e.g. of animals) and ban a lot of positive options (e.g. euthanasia, liberal eugenics).

If we had more of a utilitarian consensus, I would be more motivated to be productive and maybe work more out of altruism. But as it stands, we don't even seem to have a positive vision of the future that contains more pleasure than pain.

[Carbon !5XmfGkN7AQ No.5713797]

>>5713714
Because of balance..
For someone to benefit...someone has to suffer.
That's the foundation of economics.
Profit is gaining from someones accepted loss.
Hundreds of factory workers must "suffer" economically by getting reduced returns on their work for the factory owner to be rich.

Even in nature, for larger organisms to thrive, many smaller organisms must die.

[Anonymous No.5713829]

>>5713797
>For someone to benefit...someone has to suffer.
>That's the foundation of economics.
Oh god, that is so retarded. You might just as well have written:

For someone to save a jpg on their harddrive, it must be deleted on someone else's harddrive.

>Even in nature, for larger organisms to thrive, many smaller organisms must die.
Yes. But the cannibalistic jungle of wildlife is not the only way in which resources can flow and recycle. You could imagine a sustainable life support system that does not rely on killing live animals routinely

And of course, death is not the same thing as suffering, you could theoretically have painless death.

[Anonymous No.5713853]

>>5713797

Except that for a trade to even occur both parties must have at least covered the costs of their transaction and in addition earned some perceived benefit.

You're fucking retarded.

[Anonymous No.5713887]

>>5713853
He's not completely wrong though, in the sense that ultimately, there are resource limits, which means win-win doesn't go infinitely far.

And in this actual world, a great percentage of interactions are simply non-consensual, which can make them arbitrarily harmful and parasitic.

[Carbon !5XmfGkN7AQ No.5713972]

>>5713853
>consumerism doesn't exist
covered the costs of their transaction and in addition earned some perceived benefit.
perception=/=reality
A "ripoff" is when your perception fucks you over and the reality is that you've taken a major loss.
A normal transaction does not normally consist of parties that willingly trade items of equal value. Normally, parties are willing to take a loss for that "percieved benefit" which is really just desire/demand for an object they need.

There is a reason there are underpayed sweatshop workers, regardless of how they trade their services for the "percieved benefit" of feeding their family. This doesn't mean they are not getting fucked, albiet willingly.

[Anonymous No.5714036]

>>5713972
It is a matter of perspective. If the deals are consensual, unless there is fraud or strong information asymmetry, it is relatively good evidence that they are mutually beneficial.

Most sweatshop workers are better off having the sweatshop job than not having it, all else equal.

Inequality is not the same thing as suffering.

[Anonymous No.5714056]

>>5713829

This. The world isn't a zero sum game. All that energy that the sun pumps down to us every second is free. There can be profit without loss. The Earth isn't a closed system - it is open to space and to the past.

[Anonymous No.5714717]

I think it's save to say that technology could help to make most lives worth living and most deaths relatively bearable.

Factory farming and other animal abuse will not be needed in the future. Mental and physical illnesses for humans can be cured better with better knowledge. Extreme poverty can be alleviated.

Once most lives are worth living, the most important question is space colonization. The universe is VERY big. This galaxy alone could potentially fuel quadrillions of human life-years with good sex, food, entertainment etc.

[Anonymous No.5714730]

>>5713797
>For someone to benefit...someone has to suffer.
>That's the foundation of economics.
I'd like to introduce you to Pareto Efficiency. Your argument is invalid.