"I have defined happiness as deriving purely from pleasure, and my definition of pleasure is so wide-ranging as to be virtually meaningless."
Can't argue with that, because it's a stance designed to be logically insular.
This guy gets it. He may not agree with it, but he gets what I am saying. I am defining pleasure broadly, I define pleasure as all that
feels good. How that is meaningless? I don't know.
It's not really controversial either, seeing that wiki has the same definition for it.
Pleasure describes the broad class of mental states that humans and other animals experience as positive, enjoyable, or worth seeking. It includes more specific mental states such as happiness, entertainment,enjoyment, ecstasy, and euphoria. In psychology, the pleasure principle describes pleasure as a positive feedback mechanism, motivating the organism to recreate in the future the situation which it has just found pleasurable. According to this theory, organisms are similarly motivated to avoid situations that have caused pain in the past.[I can't tell if this is a good gif, or a bad gif 
Thanks for ignoring what I typed. If you continue to do this, then this debate is completely pointless and I will stop responding.
The scenario's that I provided distinctly goes against your attempt to refute what I had to say, specifically placing a fence in the ward. As I stated at the end. His toe hurt, his hands hurt, and his muscles were sore. He was not "comfortable" but he was happy. I feel sorry for you because you clearly have not experienced happiness in your life and that makes me sad. I want you to be happy, not just "abstained from pain".
Personally, I think you're the one that's disregarding my argument. Slaves experience all the thing you described but they're not happy about them. I think it's logical that they aren't happy about them. They have no reason to be. The person you described does, he likes doing things for the people he cares about or some corny bullshit but, for some reason, it's a pleasant sensation to him. Likewise, pleasure can exist with pain. You can eat ice cream while you have a broken arm. More similarly, you can work for money. You may not like working, but you're content about your work because you think the rewards are worth it.
I recently suffered a bout of depression, were I was completely and utterly unhappy with myself and with life. During that time I was never in any point, I had plenty of sources of pleasure. I had delicious food to eat, great video games to play, plenty of friends to hang out with, and I have had sex more then once during this period. Did any of that make me happy? Everything that you use to define what you call "Happiness/pleasure" occurred, and yet I was sad and depressed.
If there wasn't a source of pain in your life or discomfort, or if you don't have a source of pleasure today that you didn't have back then, then you probably have a neurological misbalance that doesn't allow you to respond normally to situations. Don't ask me.
That is because you define happiness as a physical value and attribute. Despite me providing an direct real life example of having pleasure and being sad, you continue to follow through with the same policies, you continue to believe that pleasure immediately leads to happiness. I have again provided a situation were I had multiple sources of pleasure, ranging from physical to non physical, and was still not happy. All of the pleasure in the world can not make a person happy, if that person is denied a single thing that he wants.
Happiness is physical. It's a sensation. It's a feeling. It occurs, then, neurologically. What, do you think happiness is some sort of paranormal thing? I think that unless something is wrong with people's brains, they have negative emotions when they have pain, and have happiness when they have pleasure. Sometimes we have pleasures that don't counter-act the pains of our lives. A crack addict gets plenty of pleasure, but he has no reason to define himself as happy seeing that his condition burdens him with a heavy amount of pain. Who knows? All I can say is that if you emotionally respond different to the same exact stimuli (i.e. you are happy now even though your life is
exactly the same as it was when you were sad) then you probably have something wrong with you at the psychological level. If there are, however, different stimuli in your life making you be happy today... then you have sources of pleasure/have gotten rid of sources of pain. In a nutshell, you have either increased the amount of pleasure in your life or have gotten rid of displeasurable things.
Also, I don't believe that pleasure leads to happiness. I believe that all happiness is pleasure and that happiness is defined by pleasure. We can be sad and have pleasure, we can binge on ice cream after breaking up with an ex-girlfriend. We can have a pleasure, it won't take the sadness away (i.e. the fact that we generally feel bad).
And again, you completely ignore me and tell me that "All love fades" when I provided a clear, real life example of real love where people have been married thirty years and still love each other just as much. What you think is "love" is what people tell themselves is love out of fear of not being alone.
I think that any 30 year old marriage is maintained on fear of not being alone. Do you know why divorce rates were exponentially lower 50 years ago than they are today? Women didn't get divorce, out of fear of not having a source of income. Fear is a big determinant of why people do what they do. Fear is how we avoid pain. Long lasting relationships exist because they provide each other comfort. In 30 year old relationships, the lover becomes something like an air conditioner. We're used to it and we're certainly not thrilled by it, but we certainly want it to remain there because we don't like heat (pain).
The reason why this argument is pointless, is because you have yet to experience happiness, and thus you hold on to an belief of what happiness really is without actually knowing anything about it. This is like a 13 year old trying to tell me that a breast feels like a bag of sand. If I had never felt one, I would agree with him, but I have felt one, and it sure as all hell doesn't feel like that.
Good day to you 
I never thought breasts felt like bags of sand.
Edited by kami12, 15 August 2012 - 03:59 PM.
