Fascinating that your experience is exactly on point. I love many things. But sometimes I can't get myself to care.
Check out the Nautilus Board of Advisors. I think half of them are from the Santa Fe institute, basically the technocrats' technocrats. So on that note This article is neuroreductionist faff. Clearly, to achieve constant happiness, one must live with a gradually improving series of circumstances. All it needs is planning and resources.
So simple! Buddhist monks also experience differences in habituation. In this as in many other things, I take my lead from Ambrose Bierce. I think this thread is lending too much weight to the no-doubt editor assigned subtitle of the piece. It seems to me Dr. Raman is 1 making a relatively benign point that humans notice change 2 wrapping it in her research on ionic mechanisms. I enjoyed it and think it hits the Nautilus sweet spot of asking a somewhat existential question then relating it to some interesting science.
Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.
They achieve this through constant meditation, but every time I've tried to meditate I just can't. I wonder if my Autism interferes with the ability to meditate. This is really interesting on the science, but I'm not convinced that offering the truism 'we get used to things' is much of a contribution to the question of happiness.
In fact only two pars in the piece — the first and the last — deal with the question that is posed in the headline. Furthermore, the writer appears to conflate pleasure and happiness, which seems a rookie error posted by criticalbill at AM on March 27, Five questions I'm genuinely interested in the answers to: 1.
What meditation practices have you trialled? When you've tried to meditate, how much time have you allocated to the session? How much time in total have you spent trying to meditate? Last time you tried, what happened that lead you to conclude that you'd failed?
What would need to happen to lead you to conclude that you'd succeeded? I'm basically happy all the time. It's not like I'm never sad, or mad or bored, but those are more fleeting. I wonder if this means there is something mentally wrong with me? Oh well! I'm convinced our brains got too big at some point, and they seem to have a pretty good gig going. The machine would allow you to experience the bliss of fulfilling your every wish. You could be a great poet, become the greatest inventor ever known, travel the Universe in a spaceship of your own design, or become a well-liked chef at a local restaurant.
In reality though, you would be unconscious in a life-support tank. Because the machine makes you believe that the simulation is real, your choice is final. Would you plug in? This hypothetical situation might seem frivolous, but if we are willing to sacrifice limitless pleasure for real meaning, then happiness is not the highest good.
In , the philosopher who wrote those words, John Stuart Mill, became mired in unhappiness. In his autobiography, Mill describes what we now recognise as depressive anhedonia: "I was in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to; unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent. Mill could take no pleasure from life. This would be bad for most people, but for Mill it pointed to something even more worrying.
Bentham went further than Epicurus by making happiness the ultimate appeal of an individual life and the ultimate appeal of morality. For Bentham, all moral, political, and personal questions can be settled by one simple principle — "the greatest happiness for the greatest number".
But if that was the one principle to live by, how could Mill justify his own existence, devoid as it was of happiness? Dissatisfaction, unhappiness, and pain are part of the human condition and so "it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied", according to Mill. He continued to believe that happiness was deeply important, but came to see that aiming at happiness will rarely lead to it.
Instead, Mill thought that you should aim for other goods, and happiness might be a felicitous by-product. But this also suggests that a good life can be an unhappy one. What Mill recognised was what Aristotle had argued two millennia earlier — the passing pleasure of happiness is secondary to living a good life, or of achieving what Aristotle called eudaimonia. Eudaimonia is difficult to translate into our contemporary concepts.
Some, like the philosopher Julia Annas, translate it directly as "happiness", while others scholars prefer "human flourishing". Whatever the translation, it marks a distinctive contrast to our modern conception of happiness. Like our modern conception of happiness, eudaimonia is the ultimate purpose of life.
But unlike happiness, eudaimonia is realised through habits and actions, not through mental states. In his Nicomachean Ethics , Aristotle wrote: "As it is not one swallow or a fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy. Like the utilitarians, Aristotle argued that happiness and virtue were inextricably linked. For Aristotle, virtue is a characteristic which achieves a mean or middle position between extremes. For example, between the extremes of cowardice and foolhardiness lies bravery, between the extremes of the miser and spendthrift lies generosity.
Acting so to maintain a balance between extremes is virtuous action. But where the utilitarians reduced morality down to happiness, Aristotle held that virtue is necessary but not sufficient for eudaimonia. We cannot flourish unvirtuously, but nor is being virtuous a shortcut to eudaimonia. Rather, virtuous action is itself a part of eudaimonia.
The relationship between ethical goodness and living a good life was, Annas claims , the defining question of ancient philosophy. For Aristotle, we flourish by exercising our uniquely human capabilities to think and reason. Moreover, in most aspects of everyday life, a person will not be affecting large numbers of other people, and thus need not consider his or her actions in relation to the good of all, but only to the good of those involved.
It is only the people who work in the public sphere and affect many other people who must think about public utility on a regular basis. Another criticism of utilitarianism is that it leaves people "cold and unsympathizing," as it is concerned solely with the consequences of people's actions, and not on the individuals as moral or immoral in themselves. First, Mill replies that if the criticism is that utilitarianism does not let the rightness or wrongness of an action be affected by the kind of person who performs the action, then this is a criticism of all morality: All ethical standards judge actions in themselves, without considering the morality of those who performed them.
However, he says that if the criticism is meant to imply that many utilitarians look on utilitarianism as an exclusive standard of morality, and fail to appreciate other desirable "beauties of character," then this is a valid critique of many utilitarians.
He says that it is a mistake to only cultivate moral feelings, to the exclusion of the sympathies or artistic understandings, a mistake moralists of all persuasions often make.
However, he does say that if there is to be a mistake of priorities, it is preferable to err on the side of moral thinking. SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Page 1 Page 2. Summary Having responded to the objection that utilitarianism glorifies base pleasures, Mill spends the rest of this chapter presenting and responding to other criticisms of utilitarianism.
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