“Just to explain what the — I think — possible alternative view is: One could theorize that suffering/pleasure is a gestalt that modulates an experience. So the idea would be, rather than that new experiences bring new pleasure, that new pleasures bring new experiences (i.e., that liking experiences you didn’t like before involves/creates novel modulations of the experiences). I’m attracted to this view partly because I think that there are ways to describe these modulations phenomenologically:  Disliked experiences are experienced as “noise” blotting out your other experiences; liked experiences are experienced as pure signal. Now, I mean “noise” in the sense in which if you are trying to listen to a podcast and someone next to you starts talking on the phone, the person’s phone-chatter is experienced as noise: The person’s chatter is holding your attention hostage, preventing you from concentrating on the podcast, but without itself becoming a center of attention — your experience of the phone-chatter is low-resolution, flat, and untextured, much as your experience of phone-chatter in your attentional periphery would be, but with the exception that this low-resolution experience is blotting out everything else. When noise blots out your attention, there’s a net-loss of detail in your overall experiential state. I think the phenomenology of suffering is the phenomenology of low-detail overall experiential states (or of a sudden decrease in detail), and the phenomenology of pleasure is the phenomenology of high-detail overall experiential states. In pleasure, everything in your experience has the phenomenology of being at the center of attention; in suffering, nothing does.

This is a claim about what the phenomenological result of “reward” or “approval” is, rather than about what makes us like things, but it does imply that there should be a deep two-way psychological connection between detail/clarity/attention and pleasure, and indeed the evidence for this are abundant: As a rule (or at least in all cases that come to my mind), when a normally disliked experience becomes an object of attentive engagement, it becomes liked  — for example, artistic descriptions of melancholy, angst, indignation and so forth, which conjure these feelings in a controlled way that opens them to attentive engagement, sometimes cause people to fall in love with melancholia, angst, and so forth. (Notably, clinical depression is usually described as “not being able to feel anything,” which, given that clinically depressed people aren’t super-peaceful, can reasonably be interpreted as meaning that everything feels blotted out by noise.)  And pain itself is suffering-free in one of two cases: either when one ignores the pain, or when one is attentively rapt in the pain — like, sometimes the best way to deal with a headache is to concentrate *on the pain* very hard, and in these cases the suffering gets much worse if someone breaks your concentration.  And then, of course, there’s the use of meditation to make everything liked, and the Romantic idea that all intense experiences are good, and many other cultural facts of this nature.”