Pleasure, a Means That Became an End: 3 Kinds of Pleasure Alignments

Three kinds of pleasure alignments:

1. Alignment of pleasure with survival (Life's alignment with pleasure): Through the course of evolution, only life forms survived whose pleasure was aligned with survival. For instance, the offsprings who did not find sexual activity pleasurable did not pass their genes and became extinct. This means many W1 preferences are the product of natural selection through eons. What you find pleasurable today is what allowed your ancestors survive through millions of years. However, as gradually higher levels of consciousness emerged, meaning gave a new direction to pleasure.

2. Alignment of pleasure with meaning: The developement of memory and imagination in W2 created new forms of pleasure. Memory of pleasurable experiences and preferable composition could construct complex future scenarios, as well as the concept of eternal pleasure (I will address complex future scenarios when I introduce Le1 to Le5 scenarios). As the image of pleasure (or memory of pleasure) became more powerful than the first-hand experience of pleasure, all the problems began. Man became the most confused animal. In other words, as meanings became a major source of pleasure, the mankind's confusion began.

Meanings are the feeler’s evaluation of W2 compositions. The Constructs that incorporate the memory of past pleasurable states seem preferable. W2 compositions can incorporate contradictory scenarios of pain and pleasure (for instance, the past scenarios of pain and future scenarios of pleasure). There is no limit to imagination in this regard. The meaning could be so preferable that a person sacrifice present or short-term pleasure for a beautiful meaning whose future scenarios are preferable. Some of these meanings could become so perverted that they deny and contradict W1 pleasure completely. For instance, some religions create meaningful W2 compositions (that have some preferable future scenarios) and prohibit many carnal pleasures. It may seem ironic because as one breaks down any complex preferable W2 composition, one will find simple carnal pleasures as their building blocks. Pleasure can become a currency in the hand of the creators of meaning (and they can use it as they want). Different religions budget pleasure as it best suits them.

3. Alignment of pleasure with the maximum of preference fulfillment: There is no doubt that meanings can create great pleasures, but an optimum balance between W1 and W2 pleasure is needed to achieve the maximum preferences. W1 pleasure is what our evolutionary W1 body finds aligned with survival, and W2 pleasure is beautiful meanings (the evaluation of feeler of certain W2 composition). Nezman has a healthy balance between W1 body pleasure and W2 body pleasure (beautiful meanings).

In some sense, pleasure and beautiful meaning have close affinity. Pleasure is a preferable experience. Beautiful meanings also provide preferable experiences. In everyday language, beauty is the feeler’s evaluation of a W2 composition (what we feel after seeing a beautiful artwork), but pleasure is what W1 body finds preferable (what we feel when we eat a delicious meal). However, in essence they are very similar because both words describe preferable states.