| Human-Centered Computing The Pleasure Principle (2008) | |||||||||||||
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| The list of “concepts that psychology really can’t do without ” includes such notions as neuronal connectionism, degrees of consciousness, mental representation of information, and dissociation. Of the pantheon of contribu-tors to the history of psychology, Aristotle outranks all others in terms of the number of critical concepts he introduced, including the notion of the association of ideas, the law of frequency and the affiliated concept of memory strength, the notion of stage theories of development, the idea of distinguishing types of mental processes or faculties, the idea of scales of nature and comparisons between humans and animals, and last but not least, the Pleasure Principle. History of the Pleasure Principle In his Physics,Aristotle wrote, “All moral excellence is concerned with bodily pleasures and pains. ” 1–3 What he was getting at is that animals as well as humans experience pleasure and pain but that a human who lets such factors alone direct his or her behavior would be intemperate, impetuous, brutish, and self-indulgent to excess. He further said, “[In] the case of bodily enjoyments … the man who pursues excessive pleasures and avoids excessive pains like hunger and thirst, heat and cold, and all the discomforts of touch and taste, not from choice but in opposition to it and to his reasoning, is described as inconti- | |||||||||||||
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