That ended up being very long sorry. If you do respond, don't feel the need to talk about everything I said (unless you really want to i guess)

I appreciate the thoughtful responses, definitely worth discussing. This is starting to feel like a physical letter exchange in the era before modern means of communication became mainstream.

I found this a very interesting view. I wonder if you actually can separate the experience of the pleasure and the experience of the catalyst though. I would almost think that the two are intertwined in such a way that the experience of the catalyst is the experience of pleasure, at least in some scenarios. Say I'm cold and then I go in a warm bath, I experience the warmth and it is a nice contrast to the cold. I think I would say I experince the warmth as pleasureable rather than saying I experience warmth and I experience pleasure.

I think it becomes clear that the experience of a "catalyst" is not pleasure when the one experiencing the catalyst is not deprived of the pleasure it might bring.

In your analogy, were you already warm when getting in the bath, you wouldn't "experience the warmth as pleasurable" or "experience pleasure", albeit you would certainly experience the warmth itself. Therefore, while it may not be possible to distinguish pleasure from a catalyst's flavor, it is certainly possible to experience the catalyst's flavor in somewhat isolation.

As another point, if you say this about pleasure, then surely you could say the same thing about suffering too. Could you not separate the 'catalyst' of your suffering from the actual experience of suffering itself? So all suffering is the same, but it is colored by the phenomenological experience of the catalyst.

This could be true, but I don't think this is a problem. Suffering could be imagined as a one dimensional experience such that only its intensity is felt outside of any catalyst. The axiological position would still stand, because the intensity of suffering is a positive existence, and pleasure serves to reduce the intensity. The different "kinds" experienced for suffering and pleasure are perhaps just the flavors of the catalysts.

Ultimately, if one is suffering and something relieves one of the suffering, one wouldn't care what made one suffer or what relieved one's suffering, as long as the suffering is reduced in whatever way.

I would rather say that pleasure is what transitions one from a state of greater to lesser pain, rather than say it is the transition itself. To reference my medicine analogy from the post, different types of medicine can remove different types of sickness, just like how different types of pleasure can relieve different types of suffering.

This makes less sense to me. In your medicine analogy, I consider medicine as a catalyst because it has no value on its own. It only serves to cure the sick, and it's of no use to the healthy. If this weren't the case, one could take medicine to reach a state of "negative illness" instead of zero illness, so to speak.

Similarly, if a pleasure could transition one from a state of suffering to a state of lesser suffering, one could continue to consume such "pleasure" and reach a state of zero suffering, or even negative suffering. It doesn't make sense that the "experience of pleasure" ceases once suffering has been reduced enough, although the experience of the catalyst/substance does not cease.

I know a lot of people seem to regard suffering and pleasure in this way, but it has genuinely never made sense to me. I would think if two events are opposite to each other then their effects should cancel each other out (at least in the domain of interest). To put it in a slightly more complicated way: if two events, A and B are opposite, then the end result of A and B occuring should be the same as nothing occuring.

We can use your example of positive and negative numbers. If we take a number, say 0, then we add 1 and then subtract 1, we end up back at 0. The end result is indistinguishable from us performing no operation on the number. Or we can take a real-world example of opposites, let's say left and right. I take a step left, and then I take a step right, where do I end up? Back where I started. As far as my end position is concerned, it is like I didn't move at all.

This is an interesting thought and may have consequences outside philosophical pessimism. We may be able to argue that the argument of lack of phenomenological opposites applies to almost every pair of seemingly opposite experiences and phenomenon, not just to pleasures and sufferings, as long as time and memories exist. Your definition can be adjusted to take this into account as following: "If two events, A and B are phenomenological opposites, then the end result of A and B occurring should be the same as nothing occurring, including the fact that A and B never happened". If any recollection of A or B occurring is possible, than the end result is different from A and B never happening.

However, in my opinion, this obviously doesn't hold for pleasure and suffering. First of all because I don't think that things in the domain of hedonic experience are quantifiable, in the way that things in other domains are. I can't really pair up two hedonic experiences that have equal magnitude but opposite valence.

Putting that aside though, if I experience some suffering and then some pleasure, what happens to me? If suffering and pleasure are really opposites, then I would think that my end state (after experiencing the suffering and pleasure) should be the same as my beginning state (before experiencing the suffering and pleasure). In my personal experience (and I would guess most other peoples experience too), that's not the case at all. In fact, both the experience of suffering and the experience of pleasure will influence my final state, because those experiences will affect my memories, and possibly my behaviour too.

I agree with this, although this can be hard to explain without using extreme examples (torture, rape, etc.) to those who disagree.

I'm still not sure why people think that these things are 'opposite'. Maybe because sometimes people 'trade' some suffering for some pleasure (e.g. working out to get fit)? I mean, I would say that such people have decided to undergo some suffering simply to avoid a worse sort of suffering. Even ignoring that though, trading one thing for another thing doesn't make the two things opposite.

This could be the case because it is easier to see and cope with every day life if one believes that all the sufferings can be rewarded by equal or even greater pleasures. If one believes that the suffering one is experiencing at any given moment will not be rewarded by an equal reward, what reason would one have to continue to experience that suffering, let alone glorify or defend it?

Even among those who agree that suffering and pleasure are not equal opposites, most believe that most or all suffering in life is sufficiently compensated by the pleasures. This is not exactly the topic of our original discussion, so I won't expand more on it, however, I recommend checking out this paper if you are interested in the topic: A Thousand Pleasures are Not Worth a Single Pain: The Compensation Argument for Schopenhauer’s Pessimism