There is no such thing as pleasure

Nausea is physiologically and neurologically quite different from pain. The only commonality is that we don't enjoy either.

Perhaps it would make more sense to you if you substitute "enjoyment".

For my part, I can't find anything in common between certain pairs of physical pains. A sinus headache and a burn are both clearly physical pain but I don't detect a sameness between the way they feel.

You could argue that "pleasure" is a broken word, that brings up associations that are usually useless or distracting in the context of other things categorized by that word. But it's clear what the word refers to, so people can well use it.

You'd need to make a case for its usage leading to incorrect inferences. Given the sequence on words, this discussion must be held to a higher standard.

With all of the pleasurable experiences you describe, I often (usually?) experience a feeling of relief afterward.

After eating a good meal, or sex, or listening to good music, or solving a hard problem, I imagine myself sitting back and letting out a breath--and that moment of reflection is very similar between these activities.

I'm not formulating this very well but it is a direction that I would look for a commonality for pleasurable activities.

Agreeing with others, you don't go too far enough. I find painful things about as dissimilar as pleasurable things.

On the other hand, it seems like I'm "carving nature at its joints" to separate things that I like from things that I dislike - there is something that poetry and pushpin have in common that is not shared by a stubbed toe.

Melancholy; loneliness; listening to a terrible song; eating a shit meal; awkward sex.

These posses qualities as diverse and textured as your "pleasure".

You are comparing cerebral pleasure to physical pain, yet you have ignored cerebral horrors and physical pleasures.

"If there are people who do experience a definite thing common to all enjoyable experiences, this might be one reason for the attraction, to some, of utilitarian theories -- even for taking some sort of utilitarianism to be obviously, trivially true."

People do find a definite thing common to all enjoyable experiences: they enjoy them.

Your comment raises a good point though: it would be very hard to measure one sort of enjoyment with another, especially between the "carnal pleasures" and the "intellectual pleasures", which both produce enjoyment...but how much? Without a way of measuring pleasure, you're left with subjective judgement, which may be of little use.

There are people who don't feel (as much) pleasure. I've heard clinical depression defined as anhedonia (plus some other stuff).

It's quite clear that there are different ways in which we're satisfied. I don't feel like I'm fully happy unless I'm satisfied in all of them (maybe I'm able to focus only on a momentarily intense and therefore hyper-salient satisfaction briefly, but not forever). This doesn't answer your question about pleasure, but I would equate utility to this global happiness.

I can certainly group pleasures into consistent and overlapping categories. Most things that give me pleasure:

• make me feel good about myself
• make me look good in the eyes of anyone else present
• involve giving another person or people pleasure
• involve executing some sort of well-defined skill
• involve some sort of satisfying pattern-matching
• involve discovery of something clever

Anything that isn't in this list which I might describe as pleasurable involves some sort of direct physiological pleasure-giving stimulus (orgasm, chocolate, etc.).

I'm pretty sure that based on this criteria I can predict with a fair degree of accuracy whether or not I will find an activity pleasurable; the more criteria an activity meets, the more likely I am to gain pleasure from it, and the greater that pleasure will be. If a coherent concept of pleasure doesn't exist, what am I predicting?

I fall into your camp on the pleasure issue. However, sarahC has a good point. There are lots of things I 'like' which don't have a lot in common, and a lot of things which I 'dislike' which also don't have a lot in common. Human desires are complex.