X-Message-Number: 25291 Date: Sun, 12 Dec 2004 08:58:55 -0800 Subject: Suffering and Happiness, to Robert From: <> Dear Robert, [snip] You wrote: "The absence of pain does not imply stagnation. Pleasure can have differences of kind and differences of degree, providing ample motivation." People will always choose what they perceive to make them happiest. Therefore, if they switch from one kind of experience to another, this necessarily implies the kind of experience they switched from made them less happy (in their own eyes) than the kind of experience they are switching to. This implies one of two things: people will never revisit old experiences, and will eventually stagnate on the kind of experience that gives them the most happiness (unless there are an infinite number of new kinds that they keep discovering), or the value that people place on an experience changes with time (e.g. goes down with overexposure to that experience). In the latter case, clearly change of experience can only be the result of some measure of dissatisfaction---i.e. thinking that some other experience will give you more happiness than the present one, at the present time. This is what I meant by 'suffering'. Of course, I would consider it a very tame world in which this were the only kind of suffering to exist. [snip] Best Regards, Richard B. R. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=25291