Do chimpanzees really enjoy eating bananas?

Perhaps you mistyped the URL for the "Ask Chimpanzees" website? Chimps do have brains very similar to ours, and it's likely that when they eat the food that they pursue, they are in states that are physiologically like ours when we eat what we enjoy. Plus their brain states play similar roles to our enjoyments: they lead the chimps to keep eating (and not to discard the food and look elsewhere), they reinforce the chimps' preference for the food item, and so on. I think most people familiar with chimps would say, obviously they enjoy bananas. Ah, you say, so they have pleasure analogues when they eat bananas, but do they literally experience pleasure? And how could we ever answer this? What is pleasure--what constitutes feeling pleasure? Is it a physiological sort of state that requires having brains like ours? Maybe so--maybe what we're confronted with when we notice our pleasure is in fact some physiological state, and it's this that we call "pleasure". Or is pleasure...

Is it possible to measure sorrow or happiness, if so can a person's grief or joy be greater than another persons'? BJ Hebert Lafayette, LA

This is one of those questions where your first impulse is to say "of course!" and "impossible!" at the same time (which is of course impossible): Of course! We have little trouble discerning that the suicidal depressive is less cheery than the tiny tot with her eyes all aglow. We're very confident even about much subtler discriminations: for instance, that runner who has finally achieved his personal best is more elated than this chef who is satisfied that her new dish will maintain the restaurant's reputation. But, impossible! We can't get the chef's satisfaction into the same mind as the runner's stoke. And don't we have to be able to do that to compare them? Couldn't it be that the chef's joy is far greater, and yet she reacts to that level of joy in a far more subdued way than the runner would (perhaps her "baseline" mood would make the runner skip and sing)? Maybe brain science can help us? Suppose we've determined experimentally (imagine a really enormous and exceptionally well...

Is happiness an absolute or a relative state?

Obviously there's more than one thing we might mean in saying that someone is happy. Are we describing a momentary or a stable state? A bright mood and outlook or deep satisfaction? Even if we've sorted these things out, saying simply that someone "is happy" seems to make a yes-0r-no matter out of a matter of degree. That is, the simple "is happy" means "is happy to a great degree". But then "great" reveals more mush; surely what degree of happiness counts as "great" (as settling that the person "is happy") is not a matter that is eternally cast in stone--it might vary from context to context. Perhaps in some contexts, the relevant degree is fixed as something like the 60th percentile of current human happiness (yes, that's full of very artificial precision--just squint while reading for the proper effect). In that case, it seems that indeed it can be a relative matter whether someone, in a particular context, is correctly called "happy". (It would be nuts to say simply that "is happy" means ...