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Comment by azhu | Hacker News Reader

Examined closely enough, optimism, confidence, and happiness are naught but delusion themselves. IMHO you are not being overly cynical in being skeptical, just do not discard these conclusions entirely. Weigh them amongst other studies. I suspect that the future will bring many more discoveries that approach health as a holistic relationship between mind and body. The brain is an organ like any other.

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> Examined closely enough, optimism, confidence, and happiness are naught but delusion themselves.

I agree completely. The base human emotions are all prone to delusion, but have substantial effects on the human body. "Unjustified" confidence and optimism can still have a great impact on physiological health. However, "perceived physical activity" is such a hyper-specific and abstract thought, that it doesn't engage our reptilian brain the same way something like "confidence" would. Hence why I find the study's conclusion pretty surprising.

I think that the belief that confidence and optimism improve health can cause extreme pain even when well intentioned.

An example from my experience is when an oncologist lies about a terminal cancer patient being in remission in the belief that a false confidence will cause them to last longer.

Emotions (and the feelings that combine to form attitudes) are delusions does not make sense. Physiological responses from an infant onward, are informed, but does not suppose a mental model that diverges from reality. The psychological assessment that we have multiple competing personalities that form our mental self inevitably leads to something that appears to be semi-random state. It's just internal physiological chaos manifest.

Genuinely curious here: I created an account for this. How do you know that your delusion-sensing faculty is reliable, i.e., that it itself is not a delusion?

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