Comment by peterwwillis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by peterwwillis | Hacker News Reader

Say the sun makes you happy, and one day you wake up to a cloudy day. Will you be unhappy? The sun didn't impose happiness upon you, just like the clouds didn't impose unhappiness. Your expectations and desires created your feelings, which respond to change. But you can choose what your expectations and desires are. And this means that you choose what creates happiness or unhappiness.

Rather than having an expectation, have no expectation. Don't have an expectation, and you won't be disappointed at a different outcome. Don't have a desire, and you won't be unhappy when it goes unfulfilled. Don't expect the sun, and the clouds won't make you sad. Don't desire pleasure, and you won't feel cheated when you receive none.

Aside from your feelings, you can of course change things in your life if you want to. You can right a wrong, improve your standing, paint your room green, move to a new city, whatever. But don't do those things in order to chase a feeling of happiness; that's a dog chasing its tail.

But on the other hand: if you aren’t consciously acting to optimize your life-experience toward any particular terminal preferences you have, then aren’t you just a mental vegetable—in the “elephant and rider” metaphor, an elephant whose rider has checked out and isn’t steering the elephant any more? Can the rider actually survive without ever attempting to do anything but passively observe? I would expect your consciousness to simply decay, like an unused muscle. (And it is my understanding that heavy enough doses of anti-psychotic drugs, taken chronically, do effectively submerge consciousness in this way, resulting in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delirium .)

I get that this is kind of what is meant by the Buddhist concept of nirvana; but I’ve always wondered what the difference is between “achieving nirvana and then living for a hundred years” and “achieving nirvana and then immediately committing suicide.” If you don’t care any more, why are you still going on? Why is the sensory tape still playing, if nobody is watching to learn anything from it?

Does a flower stop being pretty just because you don't expect or desire it to be pretty? Your desires don't have any effect on the flower. But it's still pretty. And so, it being pretty, you can choose to experience this flower as a beautiful, wondrous thing, and take great pleasure out of its existence.

It may also be stamped upon in the next moment by a passer-by. But because you did not expect this gift, when it is gone, you won't despair. So if life gives you a gift, receive it with humility and gratitude, but do not expect to be given it.

I think there's more to it too, like how you can use your time here to create things that will also bring you peace and happiness, and not being disappointed when they don't work out. Hard to explain here as it's kind of a broad topic and I'm no Buddhist monk ;)

What does it mean for something to be beautiful, except to desire the sensory experience of looking at it?

I mean that in a neurological sense—is there really any kind of reward you can experience from sensory data other than the dopaminergic kind that is attempting to potentiate you toward a specific response to said stimulus (e.g. increasing place preference for places that have pretty flowers in them)? If you were to permanently shut down your dopaminergic reward system—to cease to want—would you still experience sensory stimuli as rewarding? (I honestly don’t know; it’s an interesting question.)

If you truly have no desires whatsoever—if all is equal in your mind—I would expect you to also have no aesthetic experience. You wouldn’t see “a beautiful flower”; you’d just see “a flower.”† Seeing a flower and seeing a garbage dump would be strictly equivalent to you, just as they are to someone who is heavily depressed. (And this is what I was getting at by mentioning delirium: people in a delirious state do not bother to move their heads to look at things, unless doing so is necessary to do something they’re forced or ordered to do. This is because they don’t prefer the experience of looking at a flower to the experience of staring at the wall—so why stop staring at the wall?)

† Which is, again, a thing they say that reaching Buddhist enlightenment gets you: “mountains are mountains, and waters are waters.”

Desire isn't pleasure. Desire is essentially an expectation with an ultimatum: I want this thing, and if I don't get it, I'm going to be unhappy. Desire is a slightly more intense form of 'to want'.

Pleasure is a subjective, aesthetic experience. Increased dopamine levels certainly map to increased feeling of pleasure, but you can also experience pleasure without increased dopamine levels. You can feel pleasure about just about anything - it's just an idea in your head. You don't even have to "want" that idea, as in expecting it, working towards it, etc. It can just kind of pop up in your brain and you can feel good, or you can search for it and make it pop up.

I think the distinction is really whether you have pleasure as your goal, and whether you let outcomes change your state of mind. If the root of suffering is the dissonance between desire and reality, avoid suffering by not having a stake in the outcome. Decide to experience pleasure when you want to, without attaching it to an expectation. Go for a walk to look for pretty flowers, but don't expect them to be there. I would again compare it to a gift: don't feel bad when you don't get one, but enjoy it when you do.

> Does a flower stop being pretty just because you don't expect or desire it to be pretty?

Sometimes. If I didn't desire it to be pretty, then I may have never planted it. By not desiring it to be pretty, we limit ourselves to enjoying only those flowers planted by others or by nature. Maybe that's enough. Or maybe there's less in the world to enjoy when so many people stop desiring to enjoy. Or maybe our appreciation for the beauty of a flower is simply heightened when it's the fruit of our investment in planting and nurturing it, which was motivated by our expectations and desire for it to be pretty.

> It may also be stamped upon in the next moment by a passer-by.

It has less chance to be trampled if my desire for it to live motivated me to take measures to maximize its chances of survival, such as planting it in a garden where it's less likely to be trampled, or watering it, or giving it better soil in which to grow.

There are probably good lessons to be learned from both points of view. Having expectations may be the necessary evil that drives us to change things for the better. But it also makes us less happy when they don't pan out. In fact, I think that's the message in the many sayings about changing what we can and accepting what we can't.

I am a Buddhist. I had a heck of a time getting my garden ready for a party last weekend because caterpillars are rampaging my roses. Do I let the caterpillars be, since they’re just “doing their caterpillar thing,” or do I trim the branches on which they’ve taken root in order to let the roses thrive just a little bit more?

It felt like much more of an internal crisis than it likely was, but your post echoed the innate desires I struggled with last week.

FWIW I feel that I have much more respect for “things as they are” since setting out on this journey. Desire for prettiness may lead you to plant flowers, but I have found myself much more appreciative of the world around me on a much wider spectrum than I used to. Prettiness isn’t inherently good - it’s just another aspect of things. I still smell roses, and they are often pretty, but the unprettiness of their surroundings is equally valid and in a sense necessary to enjoy their prettiness together. The beauty is in the system as a whole, not the prettiness of the roses.

By the way, I ultimately let the caterpillars and roses duke it out on their own.

That is actually an incredibly interesting anecdote about the catepillars. Thanks for that!

It's kind of funny, because your second point about the unprettiness of the rose's surroundings being equally valid as the prettiness of the roses reminds me of how I started liking some of the foods I had hated as a child.

At some point in my young adulthood, I started appreciating tastes for what they were, as experiences. In this way, I began thinking about the sensations that foods triggered, and how interesting and different the foods I didn't used to like were. It made me start appreciating them just for being able to experience the uniqueness of the taste and texture, and next thing I knew, I no longer disliked those foods.

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