Axiology

• Pleasure & Pain constitute the faculty of motivation. The faculty of motivation is the base principle of change or motion in the psyche, leading to all action people undertake; moving muscles, shifting attention, thinking, and so on. 

The Nature of Pleasure & Pain

• Pleasure & Pain are like sensations in that they are an example of qualia, however unlike sensations they possess the quality of valence.
• Pleasure & Pain are like sensations in that they form the basis of values, just as sensations form the basis of beliefs. 

• Pleasure is the psychological force that drives toward its presence. It is the essence of goodness.
• Pain is the psychological force that drives toward its absence. It is the essence of badness.
• The above explanation gives some indication for why we might call pleasure positive, or more clearly, why we might call pain negative. Pain drives toward its negation.
• An important implication: One can, in principle, increase the quantity of something infinitely - however, one can reduce it to absolute zero. Thus, we can, in principle, never achieve 'perfect pleasure', as more can always be obtained. However correspondingly, we can in fact achieve 'perfect peace', a total lack of pain.

Calculating Utils

• Quantity of pleasure & pain is determined by several factors.
• The first is intensity. This is simply how strong the feeling is. The higher the intensity, the higher the quantity.
• The second is extensity. This is how much the feeling spreads. Typical explanations of Hedonism have before referred to extensity in time, known as duration - how long the pleasure or pain lasts, or how much time they take up. However, what is often ignored is extensity in space, for which there is no corresponding single word, and this is as simple as how much space the pleasure or pain takes up. The higher the extensity, the higher the quantity.
• More on extensity: Extensity may be continuous. For instance: Your toe hurting is less pain than your foot hurting (if the intensity is the same) because one's toe takes up less space than one's foot, and thus so does the pain. Both of these cases are a matter of the simple continuous extensity of the pain. However, extensity may also be broken. For instance: Your left foot hurting is less pain than both of your feet hurting (if the intensity is the same), because two feet is more space taken up than one, and thus there is less space for the pain to occupy. In this case, the pain is not continuous - your feet are not directly connected or continuous with each other. Nevertheless, the difference in space taken up is calculated all the same. Time is similar - the pleasure or pain need not continue uninterrupted - it simply needs to take up time to extend through time, even if it takes multiple events.

The Other Factors Besides Utils

• Probability - This covers the full range of necessity and possibility
• Control - Control over something can be conceived as simply the probability that it will respond in some given way to some given action. I have control over something to the degree that I can intentionally take action to induce some change in it, and with high certainty (high probability) expect it to actually respond in the expected manner. To the degree I lack control, the less certain I can be that it will respond in some manner. This kinship of control and probability is why people seek certain knowledge to create a sense of control, and try to control things to allay their discomfort of uncertainty.
• Proximity (both spatial and temporal) - Proximity has to do both with probability directly, and control. Things that are more spatially or temporally distant can be predicted less certainly, and controlled less effectively.

The Sources of Pleasure & Pain

• Pleasure & Pain may arrive from simple stimulation. The pleasure of food, drink, drugs, and much of sexual activity is of this sort, as well as the pain of damage to the body, disease, and hunger. We may refer to this as bodily pleasure and bodily pain respectively.
• However, conversely, much pleasure and pain does not result from this. In fact, I would go as far as to say that the vast majority of pleasure & pain is not bodily. Such pleasures and pains I call spiritual pleasures and spiritual pains, or else spiritual preferences, resulting as they do from the activity of the spirit.
• Some spiritual preferences are innate, and come prewired into us. For instance, we come with an innate spiritual love of intimacy with other people and hatred of loneliness. Such things 'innate' because we do not learn them, but they are still 'spiritual' because they constitute a pattern of pleasure and pain generated from things that require cognition, unlike things like the pain of hunger and the pleasure of drugs.
• However, most spiritual preferences are acquired or learned. 
• Spiritual pleasure is how masochism works; it is a reaction of pleasure to pain, for one reason or another, due to the spirit; it is not that the pain is no longer driving toward absence for that person, but instead that some outweighing pleasure is added to the equation in response to it.

The Spirit and the Drives

• As the mind, or the faculty of ideation, discerns patterns in sensation, and with such patterns is able to predict configurations of sensation never seen before, so too can the spirit, or the faculty of intention, discern patterns in motivation (pleasure & pain), and with such patterns is able to do something similar. However, it does not merely predict, as motivation and intention are valent and thus such predictions lead to action.
• Although patterns are derived first or primarily from pleasure & pain, this is not the whole story. Such patterns, once discerned, may themselves take on the role of pleasure & pain in the psyche. In other words, patterns can be discerned from pleasure & pain, and then patterns can be derived from those patterns. The complex beings that humans are, we can do this multiple times; patterns derived from patterns derived from patterns, on and on. This fact gives the illusion that pleasure and pain are not the basis of all values, as they are certainly not the direct basis of all values; a pattern may be derived from another pattern, not pleasure and pain directly. However, if one keeps checking the derivation of each pattern, one eventually arrives at pleasure and pain, for which there is no basis, for pleasure and pain are a pattern of nothing.
• The mind and spirit work together to note the coincidence of certain sensations, or patterns of sensation, with pleasure and pain. This is how operant conditioning works; Pavlov's dog associated the pleasure of food with the sound of the bell. The pleasure of the food is ultimately responsible for its behaviour, but the bell is an aid, helping it to predict the pleasure, and react in anticipation of it.

Morality vs. Aesthetics

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