Comment by Collins on Not for the Sake of Pleasure Alone · 2011-06-18T17:21:37.510Z · LW · GW

It seems like there's a lot of confusion from the semantic side of things.
There are a lot of not-unreasonable definitions of words like "wanting", "liking", "pleasure", and the like that carve the concepts up differently and have different implications for our relationship to pleasure. If they were more precisely defined at the beginning, one might say we were discovering something about them. But it seems more helpful to say that the brain chemistry suggests a good way of defining the terms (to correlate with pleasant experience, dopamine levels, etc), at which point questions of whether we just want pleasure become straightforward.