More Philosophy: On Happiness
Continuing on the philisophical turn we've taken recently (where the hell did Spawnie get to this time, anyways?):
You are offered a pill that, when taken, will cause you to become perfectly happy, content, and satisified for the rest of your life. There are no side effects, but no going back either. Do you take it?
I'd love some Soma, thanks!Originally Posted by Wraith
Am I allowed to assume that human consciousness is essentially a very small dude piloting my body like a ship, and I suppose is the embodiment of the voice behind my eyes? Or does the brain have structure?
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Who's piloting the very small man?
Assume whatever you'd like about the nature of consciousNess.
The assumptions would affect my answer!
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Alright, then go with the answer most likely to be true - the brain has structure.
As Crowheart said, I found Soma incredibly creepy when I was 17, and ten+ years later I find it even more scary.
Last night as I lay in bed, looking up at the stars, I thought, “Where the hell is my ceiling?"
Then I couldn't accept your claim about no side effects (what is a side effect here, anyway?), so I'd have to turn the offer down.
e: Voted to reflect this post
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Can one be eternally happy without the counter-point of unhappiness to weigh it against?
I think it's possible to wire an electrode into the pleasure centre of the brain; the subject dies of starvation eventually as it can't be bothered to eat or drink.
e: That's a bit over-simplistic, it turns out. But maybe the principle holds?
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
I know that's true of rats NESS not sure of humans (though I would not test it). No, I wouldn't do it. I don't want to live an illusion, I'd rather be myself. I'd only advocate the taking of pills when the emotions are unjustly or disportionately being pumped out in your brain. If you are unnaturally very sad, even though you have nothing personally that you are sad about. Or if there is something to be sad about but your brain over pumps a chemical that makes you feel sadder than you are.
Either that or the subject requires increasing levels of electricity to maintain the same "level" of happy, until the required levels are either fatal or destroy some component of the risk-reward pathway. Biologically speaking, you can even maintain a subject's endorphin levels at a constant level, and "happiness" will decrease over time: so called "treatment resistant [clinical] depression." After a while, "happy" becomes the new "normal," (and/or "normal" becomes the new "depressed") and there's no way to get to "happy" that is compatible with life.
Happiness is inherently relative, and as such, cannot simply exist without its negative counterpart.
Having said all that, I'd definitely be willing to participate in a long-term clinical study aimed at determining the LD:50 value for "happy" or natural endorphins or the like.
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
-- Thomas Jefferson: American Founding Father, clairvoyant and seditious traitor.
Anyway, the original question:
I understand that being happy and content has nothing to do with shutdown of important bodily functions (like pissing or having to eat). Satisfaction is also an emotional state and shouldn't delude me into starving myself to death.
I can imagine the pill as being like a permanent state of gratitude or joy. My experiences tell me that life is optimal in that state. Such a state is eminently survivable - people do live for long periods being happy, after all. Anger and fear are horrible things and the only good thing to come of them is a sense of relief and joy when the storm passes (and lessons learned and so on).
However I also know that my capacity to assimilate new ideas into my library of morality isn't adversely affected when I'm happy - in other words, I can be joyous and simultaneously understand I've done wrong, though it's admittedly rare; but only because that combination of circumstance is rare (I usually feel bad before understanding the nature of my wrong, but this is not a rule - for example, if someone took offense to something I said, I can understand that they felt snubbed and honestly apologise, but also not feel bad about it if our opinions were polarised and we'd agreed to disagree).
I'd want the pill if it's offered, but would not take it, because so much of human intimacy revolves around awareness of other people's pain: and I wouldn't want to exist as an aberration; incomprehensible to people I care about.
edit: but if everyone else had taken it I would too!
Last edited by Momo; 12-09-2011 at 09:42 AM.
I've already said this, but I think it's bad to not feel dissapointed when you're dissapointed or to not be sad when you're sad (say a close friend dies)... Not being able to experience these emotions, these states of being, also could in and of themselves be viewed a neggative side-effect of the drug. Under typical conditions, I wouldn't take it, nor would my stance change if other people took it.
I wouldn't mind the drug existing for those who may need it.. maybe it could help people with psychological diseases.
Probably not. I'd be drilling them for factual studies they couldn't possibly have. What a "magical pill" that would be....to cause everyone who takes it to become "perfect" in their pursuits of happiness, contentment, and satisfaction. Even with their different contexts and definitions of what those things mean. Sounds like the pharmaceutical version of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. When something sounds too good to be true, it's probably too good to be true.
I would not take the pill. Happiness, contentment and satisfaction are fleeting for an extremely important reason. Individual survival, the very desire to achieve anything, depends on dissatisfaction, discontentment, and unhappiness. And so they are built into us; if they weren't we would have no civilization and our species would likely be extinct. When we are happy, content and satisfied, it feels great. When we are not, we wallow for a while, then work to do something about it. That is a bit of the human condition. Really, it is the basic fundamental conflict that must be part of any decision making species to enable survival. Spiritually, unhappiness is the gift of motivation; life's great, ugly muse.
The Rules
Copper- behave toward others to elicit treatment you would like (the manipulative rule)
Gold- treat others how you would like them to treat you (the self regard rule)
Platinum - treat others the way they would like to be treated (the PC rule)
Nivenites we be. To the core. <fleetingly contented sigh>
The Rules
Copper- behave toward others to elicit treatment you would like (the manipulative rule)
Gold- treat others how you would like them to treat you (the self regard rule)
Platinum - treat others the way they would like to be treated (the PC rule)
Well. It can go the other way too. Though I suppose they're doing a service to the species at that point.
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Sure. If you get too content, odds are you end up dead before breeding successfully. Likewise, you get too unhappy, dead w/out breeding. Species continues.
The Rules
Copper- behave toward others to elicit treatment you would like (the manipulative rule)
Gold- treat others how you would like them to treat you (the self regard rule)
Platinum - treat others the way they would like to be treated (the PC rule)
There was that study about how depression-sufferers had a more realistic world-view, I wonder how that all works out for the species' good.
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
The problem is that people tend to not react well to having a realistic view of the world. Pessimism leads to despair and inaction. Let's say every person thought that only one in a million people will really make a difference. The problem with human mentality is that most people would then stop trying, which means no one will make a difference.
Hope is the denial of reality
Good job the plebs have religion, eh?
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Which means that you think anyone actually does make a difference. Poor, naive Loki. Embrace the empty futility of it all - everything anyone's ever done will all be burned to a crispy cinder in a few billion years, followed by the heat death of our universe, followed by the radioactive decay of every fundamental particle of matter. All your hopes and efforts end up in the same place as my indifference and laziness, but you miss out on the dark sense of humor and cynically accurate outlook on the world, plus you have to expend all that extra effort. It's downright masochistic of you, when you think about it.
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
-- Thomas Jefferson: American Founding Father, clairvoyant and seditious traitor.
How about the guy who gave you access to high-speed HD porn?
Hope is the denial of reality
Noodling this a bit more, I find more complexity than I saw on first glance. For instance, can you be happy but not content? I think so. If you are not happy, does that mean you are unhappy? While I worked late on a job project last night I wasn't particularly happy about it, but I wasn't unhappy. I wanted to complete the job, I enjoyed solving the problems and correcting the very subtle errors. Would I have been happier somewhere else, doing something else? I think so. Was I unhappy? No, not really. Content? Hardly. (I find contentment to be the most fleeting of mental states.)
Human emotion is too complex to pin-hole as the OP does, I think. These three states of mind - happiness, contentment, and satisfaction - are all different. They may or may not coincide and influence each other. But they don't necessarily require each other.
If DW meant simply the pill will make you feel all these good feelings all the time - happy, satisfied and content - regardless of the condition of your life, then I am tempted to call it a suicide pill. On the other hand, if I were completely happy, satisfied and content no matter what I did, then why not work 13 hour days, 7 days a week? I would love it, right? But I would love not doing it too. It would make no difference to me at all. How would I decide what to do?
The Rules
Copper- behave toward others to elicit treatment you would like (the manipulative rule)
Gold- treat others how you would like them to treat you (the self regard rule)
Platinum - treat others the way they would like to be treated (the PC rule)
I agree; happiness and satisfaction are separate things.
That's actually the same conclusion I reached.If DW meant simply the pill will make you feel all these good feelings all the time - happy, satisfied and content - regardless of the condition of your life, then I am tempted to call it a suicide pill.
Wait a minute here. If taking this magical pill means being happy, content, and satisfied....despite any negative conditions of your life....then how could it be a "suicide pill"?
It would not be in the sense that it would make you do something like cut your wrists, though if you did, it would be with happiness, contentment, and satisfaction. If you cannot be anything but happy, content, and satisified, no matter what is happening around you, then what cues would you get to keep yourself from some sort of harm? You would be equally comfortable with or without hunger, pain, sickness, health, danger or safety. How long do you think the typical person would stay alive in this condition?
The Rules
Copper- behave toward others to elicit treatment you would like (the manipulative rule)
Gold- treat others how you would like them to treat you (the self regard rule)
Platinum - treat others the way they would like to be treated (the PC rule)
Fuck, when you put it like that, they should put some of that shit in tap water
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
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