Seligman and Pinker on Happiness
I just rediscovered this 2002 Slate Dialogue about happiness between Steven Pinker and Martin Seligman, moderated by Robert Wright. That’s a group I’d like to have dinner with! Nice bit from Pinker:
Certainly the difference between happiness on the one hand and a good and meaningful life on the other can’t be overemphasized. Last year when I lectured to my introductory psychology class about happiness I made this point using a set of thought experiments from the late philosopher Robert Nozick. If a genie offered you the possibility of living the rest of your life in a state of sublime happiness, but you had to be asleep the whole time and dreaming, never to taste reality again, would you take it? How much extra happiness would you agree to if you had to lose a unique talent, like athletic or musical giftedness, or if you had to give up 30 IQ points? To take an extreme case, would you agree to a lifelong increment in happiness on the condition that you would be transformed into a pig? Would you agree to become happier if it meant that one of your siblings had never been born or one of your children? All these examples, I said, show that happiness is not our only goal, perhaps not even our main goal, in life.
Exactly.
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I would have thought that common survey instruments like “how satisfied are you with your life” (and indeed “how happy are you with your life?”) go to whether one thinks one’s life is “good and meaningful”, rather than whether one is “happy” in the restricted (Benthamite?) sense that you and Pinker legitimately criticise. If so, does that not seem to close some of the gap between you and “happiness” types?
Everybody makes these dinstinctions a bit differently. I break it down (1) hedonism, (2) life satisfaction (3) happiness (4) well-being, where (1) is the maximization of the quantity and intensity of postive subjective states, (2) is a cognitive judgment about well life is going as a whole, (3) is a (cultually constructed) complex syndrome of positive affective, cognitive, and behavioral dispositions, and (4) is objective quality of life, including things like health, the development of basic human capacities, meaning in life, etc.
In my schema, surveys measure (2), not (4). High (4) ought to correlate strongly with high (2), but not vice versa, i.e., people who are objectively well are likely to be satisfied with life, but many people who say they are satisfied (happy slaves, etc.) may not be objectively well.
KISS
when it comes to happiness let’s kiss !
keep it simple … (but you are definitely not stupid) Happiness is an emotional feeling that is positive and best expressed in a positive way, like with a kiss. As with any response to our emotions we choose what makes us happy as we choose to be feeling that emotion and how re respond. Our choices are based on past experiences and what we learned as behavior to respond to those emotions. Is that what you are looking for in response? personally, I’d prefer to kiss. (hmmmm, free country, do you feel I out of my field? hope not, I enjoy this website, thought provoking)
Just read things over, interesting and true. If someone were to ask me what is depression, my answer would be chosen negative emotional feeling shown in trained responses. But I’d say it is much more complicated when deciding how long is appropriate to respond without physical problems causing or resulting from. It is interesting to me to understand basket of fruit.
When I think of happiness as a overall emotion to my life rather than just a response to a singular situation. I say this. “Life will always give you a full plate. The trick is to keep a well balanced diet. You don’t have to clean your plate, and it is a good idea to have dessert.”
To quote The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect:
“Prime Intellect,” Lawrence said with great care, “I would like you to begin stimulating the neurons of the pleasure center of my brain, one at a time, and remember the ones I report to you as being favorable.”
That’s the shortcut to “happiness” as I see it. Those things Pinker names - athletic ability and musical talent are just indirect ways of stimulating your neurons.
You might not want to be turned into a pig now, because you are making this decicision in your current non-complete-happiness state. If you were experiencing that constant high, being a pig would be completely irrelevant (safety concerns aside).
Layard in his book ‘Happiness’ is aware of the different kinds of happiness and of Aristotle’s and Mills’ “Pig” arguments. He says that all of these types of happiness show up similarly in the brain on PET scans; and that hence they should be equal on a moment-to-moment basis. He argues that the hedonistic types of happiness do not last and lead to unhappiness, and hence are less desirable.
Hence, unfortunately, he would seem to agree that if there were a perfect drug with no side effects; and if we could keep alive while “asleep” on that drug for 85 years, then that would be OK.
One might think that this would be only an academic argument. However, I must confess, as someone who admires Layard’s thoughts, that if this philosophy took hold one can imagine large numbers of people “opting out”. And I can’t imagine that that would make me happy ???? ….
Well said, Alex. The Pinker quote couldn’t be more illogical. A man’s decision not to exchange happiness-inducing stimulus like athleticism for a more potent (although counter-intuitive) happiness-inducing stimulus like consiouslessness (ie pig, sleep, etc) in no way corollates with the conclusion that, ‘Happiness is not our only goal.’ Even if a man were to choose the ‘lesser-happiness’ status quo with absolute comprehension of both options, you still can’t escape the fact that decisions, by nature, are subjective. In other words, your choice for a ‘lesser-happiness’ state might also yield less of whatever other measure you use (implied in the term ‘goal in life’), simply because it was a bad choice.