Comment by alexfromapex | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexfromapex | Hacker News Reader

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It's not faulty logic at all. Scientists have known for a while that your ability to experience pleasure is a result of certain biological processes.

"Recent findings in the field of neuroscience have, however, demonstrated that a single functional circuit, incorporated inside the broader dopaminergic mesocorticolimbic system, seems to be involved in the various experiences of pleasure"

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.0035...

Going back to your accusation of "faulty logic": an interruption in the ability to experience pleasure, which is established to be controlled by biological processes, having a basis in a biological process would be deductively valid logic. Anhedonia is an inability to experience pleasure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deductive_reasoning

It's not faulty logic at all. Scientists have known for a while that your ability to experience pleasure is a result of certain biological processes

Well of course on a certain level your ability to feel anything is the result of biological processes, but that doesn't mean that the specific things you feel aren't a result of the specific experiences you've had.

Nobody in this thread is arguing that feelings happen completely independently of biological processes, but there's a hugely important difference between "I had a bad experience that altered my feelings, and that's reflected in my biology" vs "my biology just did something of its own accord that had nothing to do with my life circumstances, and that change altered the way I feel".

You seem to be arguing that because anhedonia correlates with certain biological changes, that it must be caused by those changes. That could be true (and probably is true in some cases) but it does not necessarily follow that it is always true, or even true the majority of the time; the causation could could flow in a different direction.

Let's come back to my original argument that anhedonia, which is a core feature of depression but is not the same as depression, is caused by biological processes. Do you have evidence to say that it is not?

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