On 10 Apr 2013, at 23:57, meekerdb wrote:
On 4/10/2013 1:36 PM, Terren Suydam wrote:
This is close to an idea I have been mulling over for some time...
that the source of the phenomenological feeling of pleasure is in
some way identified with decreases in entropy, and pain is in some
way identified with increases in entropy. It is a way to map the
subjective experience of pain and pleasure to a 3p description of,
say, a nervous system.
You will just further muddle the meaning of entropy.
Damage to the body (associated with pain) can usually (always?) be
characterized in terms of a sudden increase in entropy of the body.
Consider dribbling some liquid nitrogen on your skin. Hurts doesn't
it. But the entropy of your body is (locally) reduced. The pain
comes from neurons sending signals to your brain. They use a tiny
amount of free energy to do this which increases the entropy of your
body also. Your brain receives a few bits of information about the
pain which represent an infinitesimal decrease in entropy if your
brain was in a state uncertainty about whether your body hurt.
Perhaps this is also true in the mental domain, so that emotional
loss (or e.g. embarrassment) can also be characterized as an
increase in entropy of one's mental models, but this is pure
speculation.
It hardly even rises to speculation unless you have some idea of how
to quantify and test it.
The case is even harder to make with pleasure. It would be weird if
it were true, but so far it is the only way I know of to map
pleasure and pain onto anything objective at all.
Damasio proposes that pleasure and pain map into levels of various
hormones as well as neural activity.
Glial cells seems to have some rôle in chronic pain. Also.
Bruno
Brent
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