Warning: this will be a long, rambling, sometimes incoherent stream-of-consciousness post. I will do little to no editing other than correcting obvious spelling mistakes that would make this unreadable. I make no apologies for my words and remind you that ‘normal’ is all relative.
I have little to no knowledge about psychology or philosophy. I have never taken a class on either subject and have read nothing on what I’m about to describe. So there’s a good chance my ideas are neither original nor creative. Oh well, I feel like I came up with them on my own.
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Let’s start with an easy one:
THE MEANING OF LIFE.I always like to take the biological angle on this one. The meaning of life is simply to propagate life. You exist so you can reproduce – make babies who will in turn make babies who will, in turn, make more babies. It’s a pretty simple goal. Take a look at every single life form on this planet. Its overarching goal is to live long enough to pass on its genes. Many life forms don’t even bother living much longer after procreating.
In a way, this seems like a stupid point of life. I think about it like dusting a table. You start with a dusty table, so you grab a feather duster and 30 seconds later the dust has been removed from the table. A few weeks later the table is dusty again, so you grab the feather duster and repeat. You’ll keep doing this for the rest of your life, because inevitably the table will always become dusty again. Why do you keep dusting then? Well, you just want to restore the table to its ‘clean’ state – even though you know it will soon be ‘dirty’ again.
In terms of sustaining life – you know you’ll die some day. You know everything that is alive will die someday, yet you insist on producing more and more. There really isn’t a point where you stop and say, ‘Well, that’s enough, I guess we can go home.’ You just keep going, to keep going.
From biology we shift to thermodynamics and the concept of entropy. As I understand it, entropy is a measure of disorder in a system. The more messed up something is, the higher the entropy. The neat thing about entropy is that it’s always naturally increasing. Again I’ll use a real-life example. My bedroom is a system. If I make no extra efforts it will naturally become more disheveled over time. Clothes will begin to litter the floor, my bed sheets will become more wrinkled, that damn dust will coat my dresser! I must put in a lot of energy (work) to restore the system to order. And again, once I’m done…it will naturally become messier.
I believe this is an unavoidable characteristic of the universe. When we put things in order, we’re not doing something that’s natural. That’s why the universe is always fighting back…and we can’t win the war. We can only hope to contain it in short mortal bursts.
I’m going to shift gears to a less scientific viewpoint. Outside of just producing babies for the sake of continuity, I believe on an individual basis the point of life is simply to EXPERIENCE. This sounds nerdy and cheesy, but when I was younger I used to watch ‘X-Men’ cartoons. In one particular episode a character named Jean-Grey becomes this celestial being known as ‘The Phoenix’. The Phoenix is this god-like entity which only has a singular goal – to FEEL…to experience things. It feeds off this life-energy.
I think we should be like ‘The Phoenix’. To be alive, we must feel. Medically, we can be considered alive as long as our heart is beating and oxygen flows through our lungs. People who are brain dead can still be kept operational with the aid of heart-lung machines. It’s like keeping the engine running once you’ve hauled it out of your car.
Our goal in life should be to experience emotions – preferably ‘good’ ones. People often call these good emotions ‘happiness’. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Like all things, happiness is a relative concept. Without some polar emotion like sadness or despair, happiness has little meaning. So can we truly be happy ALL the time?
I’d like to think so, but I’m inclined to say no. Think about your life and all the things that make you happy. If eating ice cream brings you happiness you might think sitting around all day scarfing Haagen-Daz might make you the happiest person the world. However, after a few hours of stuffing double chocolate fudge in your mouth you’ll probably start to get sick of the flavors. You may even get disgusted. Part of the happiness that ice cream brings you is due to the novelty. It’s the sensation of iciness, sweetness, richness which we don’t experience when we’re eating something healthier. If all our food had those same traits, ice cream wouldn’t be so special.
Back to some math and science – in operations research we can formulate mathematical models to represent real life systems. Although the concept of happiness is abstract, I believe you can still model it using math. A mathematical model typically has 2 components: 1) an objective function and 2) constraints. The objective function is the thing which you wish to maximize or minimize. In this case we can write something like
‘max happiness’
which simply means our goal is to maximize happiness. Constraints are like boundaries or rules that govern the solutions to our problems. These are typically in the form of inequalities, like x < 12. Going back to the ice cream example, we might write a constraint like ‘You can only eat ice cream once a week.’ With that constraint we’d eliminate the solution to maximizing happiness that would be ‘eat ice cream all the time’.
Note that the objective is to maximize happiness, not necessarily make that value infinity. There could be some cap to the maximum level of happiness one can achieve, and our goal is simply to approach that point, even asymptotically.
I guess you’d have to define things in life in terms of their happiness value (HV). Things could either increase, decrease, or not affect your HV. The interesting thing is that the HV of an object, activity, or thing is dynamic. Ice cream does not always increase your happiness. Perhaps if it’s a hot summer day it has a positive HV value, but if it’s 2 degrees below zero ice cream will probably make you less happy. There would be all sorts of factors that could chance something’s HV. Dimensions like time and space.
We could also apply some economics here – the law of diminishing returns. Again, I’m no economics whiz but I believe the gist of this theory is that the more you get of something, the less value each successive unit of that something has to you. Ice cream – again! It’s hot and you’re hungry. Someone hands you some ice cream – awesome, thanks! You finish the first pint…maybe you could go for seconds. The second one is even better since you’re really indulging now. Okay, now you’re done – do you want a third pint? Maybe not so much, you’re full now – you’re ready for something else. How about 20 more? At this point you don’t even want ice cream, so they could dump a truckload in front of you and you probably wouldn’t want to eat it.
In terms of HV, I propose that all things obey the law of diminishing returns. After you reach a certain saturation level, you no longer want those things.
I’ve been talking about food, which is an easy thing for people to relate to because we all have to eat. Another common human thing is sex (you know, so you can fulfill your biological purpose in life). I’m going to generalize and say all men want sex. We think about sex quite often – I’ve heard something like once every 7 seconds. That may be true. So even though we desire sex all the time, we don’t have sex constantly. Part of this is due to our physical limitations, but I believe after a few times, men need a break. Sex may feel great physically, emotionally, and spiritually, but after awhile you just want to go watch TV or read a book.
There’s a song that goes ‘Can’t get enough of your love…can’t get enough of your love’. I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration – you can get enough of your love. You can get ENOUGH of anything. I can’t think of anything that doesn’t obey the law of diminishing returns. If you can, let me know.
Back to our mathematical model – now that I think about it, this is even more complicated since discrete activities and things have dynamic HVs. Instead of modeling this in 1 dimension (just being concerned with maximizing happiness) we now have to optimize in 2 levels. We have to maximize the overall objective, but each discrete activity or things has its own maximization of its HV. To make this even worse, HV maximization is related to everything else! I’m not sure there’s enough computing power in the world to crunch this one.
A side note – although I think operations research/linear-programming and non-linear programming is really cool and practical stuff I don’t think I could ever be an academic in the field for 2 reasons. 1 – it’s part art and science. It takes a certain inborn genius to look at a system and see the numbers behind it. It’s really like looking at The Matrix. Some people see only what’s readily available to their eyes, others see the numbers behind it. The second reason I could never devote my life to this is that there are problems that can only be solved via brute-force methods (like branch and bound) where you have to basically eliminate all the incorrect answers before determining the correct one.
When I was in college I took a non-linear programming class which was primarily populated by grad students. One time at my professor’s office hours he explained how he had this separate computer that was devoted to running this immense branch and bound problem. I can’t recall what he was exactly trying to do, but it sounded something like ‘proving the existence of an orthogonal vector to something something’. Anyway, he explained how the program had been running for years, and if he ever found a solution he’d probably win the Nobel Prize. But odds are it’ll run until he’s dead and it’ll never find anything.
That would suck.
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Feelings – emotions – the things we must experience to make us alive.
I must take an ego-centric approach, because everything I experience is channeled through me. It seems like a stupid thing to say, but it’s true. I don’t believe in people being totally selfless. It’s not possible. Everything we do, we do because at some level it brings us joy.
Even things that seem bad, like self-mutilation or attempting suicide. I believe all our actions are done with at least some positive intent in mind. There may be negative intent as well and that negativity may outweigh the positive aspect, but there is ALWAYS a positive reason why we do something.
Think about supposedly selfless acts – giving to charities for example. Giving to a charity is, in general, a good thing. Giving to charity and demanding recognition can be frowned upon as self-promotion. Giving anonymously without fanfare is accepted as being more honorable. However, even that unknown donor has that warm feeling in his or her chest. He or she feels good that the money donated is going to help a charity.
Now, to be clear – I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the donor feeling good about his or her donation, I’m simply saying they get something out of it too. Every act we do gives us something back – even if that act is done with intent for someone else.
We do things for ourselves to make ourselves feel better. We do things for others to make ourselves feel better. We always have our own interest in mind no matter what. It’s just how we’re wired. It only makes sense.
Why can't we just impose our will on the world and take what we want? I guess part of it is that it's human nature to be insecure - to want and need reassurance that we're adequate or loved. They say you can't force someone to love you - I'd tend to agree with that. So it seems a bit unfortunate that we're wired to desire things that are beyond our control.
Many a poet has gone crazy over unrequited love (cough cough Emily Dickson). Why must we always seek things that are beyond our control? Why can't we just say 'HEY YOU! LOVE ME!' It would be interesting if the only things that mattered to our happiness were things that we had some semblance of control over.
Hmmm, so perhaps a major cause of unhappiness or a lack of happiness is uncertainty - or longing for something which you don't have control over. I know in Buddhism there is a state called Nirvana in which you have no desire. Supposedly this is the supreme state of existence because you are not wanting.
Maybe they're onto something. If you want nothing, does that mean you're happy? I'm not sure. But I know when I want something and I don't get it - or can't have it...it makes me unhappy. So if I always got what I wanted or never wanted anything perhaps I'd have a lot less unhappiness.
This sorta loops back to a previous point I made about things being relative. If you don't have unhappiness due to wanting, then do you really have happiness? Perhaps Nirvana isn't really happiness or unhappiness? Maybe it's just this state - not full, not empty - just a state floating in between.
This has suddenly got me interested in Buddhism. I'm not one for people telling me what to believe, but if my own 'independent' thoughts align, it might be worth checking it out.
After all all these people spent a lot more time pondering these grand questions than I have.
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What patterns of behavior bring happiness?
There's sensory pleasures - touch, taste, smell, sound - signals your body translates to endorphins. In terms of touch, certain things 'naturally' feel good. Silk feels nice. I'm not sure why, but I think most people would say silk feels 'better' than fiberglass. Then here's sexual pleasure - which I think is a step more complex. You are touched, but in a manner which gives you another level of enjoyment. Perhaps because you know you're going to fulfill your biological function in life.
All of these sensory things can be more complex when they're associated with memories. People often hear a song and it reminds them of someone, some place, or some time. Nostalgia, flashbacks - it's your brain being reminded of something by the stimulus. This happens to me all the time. I hear a song and I instantly am transported back to a very vivid memory. It's not just 1 sense either - I can feel the wind, the heat of the sun on my skin, the smell of the air, the taste. It's amazing how a small stimulus can unleash a flurry of memories.
We also gain happiness from accomplishing things. I think of working hard toward a goal and accomplishing it. I guess putting forth effort amplifies the sweetness of the reward. Perhaps this is due to the contrasting effect. Without suffering, there cannot be joy.
It's more satisfying to get a A on the test if you studied for a week rather than if you stole the answer key the night before.
Now that I think about it, maybe you went to a lot of trouble to steal the answer key. It might have been more work to cheat than to study. In that case, perhaps your feelings of happiness would be tempered by feelings of guilt for doing something that you know as 'bad'.
I guess the level of happiness we receive depends a lot on our society as well. We're told what to value in terms of happiness and what to devalue. Things like working hard are extolled while things like cheating are frowned upon. If we measured the happiness an accomplishment brings you based on how much suffering you had to endure it this would be a different situation.
It would be possible to suffer greatly toward a goal, but not gain as much happiness from it because society disagreed with the way you accomplished the goal. Example - your goal is to get wealthy. You decide to sell drugs for a living. Selling drugs is probably not easy work. It's probably very dangerous. You work hard and you make it big. You're rich. You should be happy.
But wait, the police don't like your methods. They throw you in prison. Suddenly you're not so happy. This is an extreme example, but my point is that society's opinion on your achievement affects how you feel about it.
Okay, I can't take any more of this Enya crap. I'm done being all deep and stuff for now.
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