[Book Review] Stubling on Happiness

Daniel Gilbert

Vintag

Chapter 1.

The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future. –p4-

A sophisticated machine could design and build any one of these things because designing and building require knowledge, logic, and patience, of which sophisticated machines have plenty. –p5-

Sophisticated machine cannot pretend to have accomplished it, conscious experience. Seeing, remembering, imagining. – p5-

To see is to experience the world as it is, to remember is to experience the world as it was, but to imagine is to experience the world as it isn’ t and has never been, but as it might be. The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future. As one philosopher noted, the human brain is an “anticipation machine, ” and “making future” is the most important thing it does. –p5-

Our brains were made for nexting, -p8-

The dramatic increase in the size of the human brain did not democratically double the mass of every part so that modern people ended up with new brains that were structurally identical to the old ones, only bigger. Rather, a disproportionate share of the growth centered on a particular part of the brain know as the frontal lobe –p11-

Damage to certain parts of the frontal lobe can make people feel calm but that it can also leave them unable to plan – p14-

Anxiety and planning, both are intimately connected to thinking about the future. –p14-

Frontal lobe is the critical piece of cerebral machinery that allows normal, modern human adults to project themselves into the future. – p15-

Havard psychology professor resigned, went to India, returned to write a popular book called “Be Here Now” ,

The key to happiness, fulfuillment, and enlightenment, the ex-professor argued, was to stop thinking so much about the future.

Because, as anyone who has ever tried to learn meditation knows, not thinking about the future is much more challenging than being a psychology professor.

Most of us do not struggle to think about the future because mental simulations of the future arrive in our consciousness regularly. -p17-

When people find it easy to imagine an event, they overestimate the likelihood that it will actually occur. Because most of us get so much practice imagining good than bad events, we tend to overestimate the likelihood that good events will actually happen to us, which leads us to be unrealistically optimistic about our futures. -p19-

Why people worry? Two reasons.

First, anticipating unpleasant events can minimize their impact.

Second reason why we take such pains to imagine unpleasant events is that fear, worry, and anxiety have useful roles to play in our lives. – p20-

The fact is that human beings come into the world with a passion for control. –p23-

People feel more certain that they will win a lottery if they can control the number on their ticket. –p23-

We want to control the direction of our boats because some futures are better than others. –p25-

We insist on steering our boats because we think we have a pretty good idea of where we should go, but the truth is that much of our steering is in vain-not because the boat won’t respond, and not because we can’ t find our destination, but because the future is fundamentally different than it appears through the prospectiscope. Just as we experience illusions of eyesight and illusions of hindsight, illusions of foresight –p25-

Subjectivity

Imagination suffers from three shortcomings, Realism, Presentism, Rationalization.

Corrigibiltiy –p26-

Shangri-la isn ’t what and where we thought it would be. –p27-

Ch2

Subjectivity, The fact that experience is unobservable to everyone but the person having it. –p29-

Emotional happiness, moral happiness, and judgmental happiness. –p33-

Emotional happiness is a phrase for a feeling, an experience, a subjective state. –p34-

In short, emotional happiness is fine for pigs, but it is a goal unworthy of creatures as sophisticated and capable as we. – p38-

The ancient Athenian legislator Solon suggested that one could not say that a person was happy until the person’ s life had ended because happiness is the result of living up to one’s potential. – p38-

If philosophers have muddled the moral and emotional meanings of the word happiness, then psychologists have muddled the emotional and judgmental meanings equally well and often. –p40-

You-know-what-I-mean feeling(emotional happiness), judgmental happiness. –p41-

We don’t always mean what we say. –p41-

One of the functions of language is to help us palp them – to help us extract and remember the important features of our experiences so that we can analyze and communicate them later.

We reduce our experiences to words such as happy. –p45-

Squishing Language, Stretching Experience

Thought experiment

Experience stretching, “They only think they’ re happy because they don’t know what they’re missing” Okay, sure, but that’s the point. –p55-

If impoverished experiential backgrounds squish our language rather than stretch our experience, then children who say they are delighted by peanut butter and jelly are just plain wrong. – p57-

So which hypothesis is correct? We can ’t say. What we can say is that all claims of happiness are claims from someone’ s point of view-from the perspective of a signle human being whose unique collection of past experiences serves as a context, a lens, a background for her evaluation of her current experience. – p57-

Happiness is a subjective experience. –p59-

Ch3

It is possible to mistake fear for lust, apprehension for guilt, shame for anxiety. –p64-

Imagine that as you experience the newspaper article, your awareness becomes permanently unbound from your experience. – p67-

Our visual experience and our awareness of that experience are generated by different parts of our brains. – p67-

Dissociation between awareness and experience. –p68-

Decoupling of awareness and emotional experience. –p69-

Scientific study of subjective experience, three premises.

The first, Imperfect tools.

The second premise, all the flawed measures of subjective experience, the honest, real-time report of the attentive individual is the least flawed. –p71-

Many of us have a mistaken idea about large numbers, namely, that they are like small numbers, only bigger. – p73-

More is not just more-it is sometimes other-than less. The magic of large numbers works along with the laws of probability to remedy many of the problems associated with the imperfect measurement of subjective experience. – p74-

When numbers are large, such imperfections stop mattering. -p75-

The attentive person ’s honest, real time report is an imperfect approximation of her subjective experience, but it is the only game in town. – p77-

But the law of large numbers suggest that when a measurement is too imperfect for our tastes, we should not stop measuring. We should measure again and again until niggling imperfections yield to the onslaught of data. – p77-

Why do we so often fail to know what will make us happy in the future? –p79-