Does modern neuroscience get us any closer to assigning utility to any given pleasure? That seems to be the focus of the article, not merely defining pleasure.
You can never just assume that a biological process actually has any utility. Some things have evolved to be just by random chance and also have no impact on your ability to survive. It would be like trying to find the utility to any given hair colour.
"Utility" in this sort of discussion is a philosophical jargon meant to encapsulate everything that might go into a rational creature's decision-making process. I.e., reason or experience may be able to tell you what actions will lead to what results, but you need something else: You need to know what results you actually want. So the goal of every rational being is to maximize its utility; and utilitarianism, a popular ethical system, defines morality as choices which maximize global utility. In economic jargon this would be "preferences"; in more everyday language it would probably best translate to "happiness".
So yes, in this sense, every hair color has a "utility", in the sense that it will make the person who has it (and the people around them) happy or unhappy to some extent. It doesn't matter why you prefer redheads to blondes -- whether it had some evolutionary advantage now or in the distant past or whether it's just a random chance; you prefer one more than the other, and so the one has a higher utility.
Re:How to Think about Pleasure
by BigBathtubLobby on Wednesday June 23, 2021 @07:25AM
(#27603197)
I'm fairly positive he's using the term "utility" in a normative sense. Like Bentham's principle of utility, which aims to quantify pain and pleasure in order to better architect a "utilitarian" (obviously) function with which to steer law.
Modern neuroscience has teased apart the concept of pleasure into wanting and liking. The implementations of those modes or modules of affect are pretty well conserved across mammals as are the physical expressions of that facet of pleasure when they are activated. Very specifically the liking is mediated by the shell of the nucleus accumbens and the ventral pallidum by glutamergic cells. Whereas the wanting aspect, or in the jargon the "incentive salience", has a lot going on but is mostly implemented by dopaminergic cells projecting to those 'liking' neural populations (among other places).
If you want to know more I highly recommend Kent Berridge's publication list. There are a few good lay reviews mixed in with the technical papers too. https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=WIRQRN8AAAAJ...