Imagining Life as a Stack of Mental States
onelobotomyplease.com
onelobotomyplease.com
I wonder what the trade-offs of adopting this perspective are. On the one hand, we'd become more attuned to our emotional states, and mental health would presumably be positively affected; but on the other hand, in creating a society that relates every single venture and activity and thought process back to the end goal of how the individual feels about it, aren't we making people a lot more selfish?
Maybe this perspective in combination with a healthy sense of altruism, ethics, vision / dreams / ambitions, etc., might be a neat way to view the world. Or maybe a lot of us already view the world a lot like this, subconsciously.
Not necessarily, we all are to a degree or another, hard wired to care for each other and to want to belong to something. I care for my neighbor because I have met him several times and I just feel within me that when he's happy I can feel better and more relaxed. It is like that Charlie Chaplin Great Dictator speech;
>"We all want to live by eachother's happiness, not by eachother's misery"
For the last year or so, I had been thinking on this topic, specially from the direction of de-radicalizing people when talking about politics, specially in today's age. I realized that the amount of time I spend talking with people and engaging them on conversation on said subjects is just a sliver of the amount of time they actually spend consuming polarizing content and altering their own neuron network to be unfriendly to new ideas, meaning that wherever I discuss things, I'm fighting asymmetrically against their set past experiences, therefore I should instead of go in long diatribes, I need to get past said wall of pre-conceved notions, arguments and dialogue trees right into shared interests and outlook, after all, we all want a better world, so we can set that as the goal and build on each other's views.
Thank you for the link btw, I very much liked that last drawing, it is super cute
It depends. When I dug deep, I realized that I get a lot of pleasure out of being a good guy: I currently mentor a kid (and have been doing so for 10 years). Very satisfying. A really shallow analysis might make it a case for using drugs.
>Our outdated brains are built to handle the realities of ancient societies. Our brain is supposed to be really good at certain things like escaping a lion attack, finding a mate, or sharing a common meal.
So, in discovering the laws of thermodynamics, evolution and quantum theory, which our brains presumably weren't designed for, we were just being lucky? When will this luck run out, exactly, and how?
Could you explain the distinction?
I can only go for a feeling. Yet the choices of subsequent future mental states based on the feelings I predict they will elicit will depend on details of what I learned last time.
So we're not really aiming at mental states. Nor are we accumulating them because in reality we forget most of the details of our experiences.
But that doesn't mean there aren't better tools for hammering nails with, or jobs that a power drill does way better than hammering nails.
(I'm not _really_ convinced that pop psychology explanations involving our brains being optimised for not-getting-eaten-by-lions are necessarily correct, but I certainly acknowledge that some of our physiology like our vision system and muscle makeup have evolved under different conditions to sitting in a university with instructions to "Write down the problem. Think really hard. Write down the answer.", as Feynman characterised the process of discovering modern physics...)
No, it was using a tool evolved over million years for something else, and very good at that something else (that it can even do it instinctively), to do another task.
And that task only 1 in millions of us can do (how many "discovered the laws of thermodynamics, evolution and quantum theory"?) that have uniquely smart brains, and that even them had to undergo years and years of training to perform them.
Case in point, billions of people can predict where a baseball would fall instinctively, thanks to their brain's evolutionary capabilities, without solving the physics equations. But to do it with solving the equations takes years of training.
Even in Einstein or Feynman or whatever, their basic evolutionary capacities and instincts (hunger, anger, lust, fight or flight, etc) would trump their physics prowess anytime...
Every action, activity, hobby, or ritual is nothing more than the pursuit of a certain mental state. "Every action, activity, hobby, or ritual can be accurately described as the pursuit of a certain mental state."
There's a lot of existing philosophy in this area, worth reading if one is so inclined.
Otherwise, that's precisely what you'd do, despite you saying the contrary.
Plenty of people find and use drugs to improve what they're feeling, and they're reasonably successful at it, from the inside, from their own perspective.
> Otherwise, that's precisely what you'd do, despite you saying the contrary.
No, it's not, and it's not what most people would do, for reasons too long to get into here. Like I said, there's a lot of literature here. Most people have pretty strong beliefs that they would rather suffer in a real world than have a satisfied fake life with managed feelings. It's only when the pain is too much that they fall back to alternatives.
Right, but you're still just trying to achieve some mental state. It's just that that mental state is impossible to reach through drugs/simulation alone.
Things are not the models that describe them; things are them selfs. Applying a model and saying: "that is the only model" is incorrect. While his model is an accurate representation of something in reality it is only accurate in its own context.
I write comments to expand my and others mind not only to socialize whatever that really means. Pushing complex things trough simple language makes them seam simple, but they are not.
Sure, and that's the perspective you would take when you are trying to construct a nuclear reactor. But what you are expected by the author to notice is that you are a human, not some detached from flesh abstract entity that can actually do anything... "real", for the lack of a better word. You only act as a bunch of tissues guided by hormonal responses and what really makes you do things isn't something you acknowledge, and all your "thinking" and "models" and comments and nuclear reactors are just a byproduct of that.
That is, you can avoid the "atomic perspective" and all the other perspectives, but you cannot avoid being you, that is a bunch of tissues guided by hormonal responses that you perceive as feelings.
> I write comments to expand my and others mind
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking when I'm typing this, previous and all the other comments. What the author is saying (I guess) is that I am mistaken. So are you.
If you don't like the atomic one but what about me as a musician or an actor or a friend, an employee.
> Yeah, that's what I'm thinking when I'm typing this, previous and all the other comments. What the author is saying (I guess) is that I am mistaken. So are you.
I am not sure that the author is arguing for that but it is a byproduct of the way he writes.
In other words: determinism. The philosophy opposed to "free will."
That is the same as saying: humans are goal directed animals, etc. Even when they are not aware of it. It's interesting as a working framework for habit makers etc.
I think that this piece extends our control over our free will (i.e. gives us more free will) because it helps us to see and understand our inner state more clearly.
But I think that strictly following it can also be limiting because it will leave out unexpected outcomes. For example you may not go to see some concert/play etc because you have estimated how it would affect your mental state and have decided it to be not worthwhile. Perhaps it would have been a ground breaking experience you could not have ever imagined.
These mental states are described in previous literature. I also didn't study philosophy long enough to have a lengthy debate, but I can identify the topic and the argument.
But why stop there? What you are saying now feels (to me) much like circular reasoning: I like X because I like X. But why do you like X? I also like to lie in my blanket and read with a cup of tea because: it is comfortable, it is safe, it is stimulating for the mind ... so I urge you to think why do you like your ritual
Which context is best to use is impossible to answer. You don't know all the contexts.
For one, you weren't born with the affection for blankets and tea. You developed it under several conditions. And you chose this particular comforting pass-time other others for several reasons.
Heck, billions of people crave the lifestyles the see on movies and commercials, and e.g. go creating rituals of "hygge" (blankets and hot beverages being essential to it) because they saw a show about it or read about it on Goop and think they will make them as happy as the people in the photos...
1. The opening note leads me to an important point: emotions =/= mental state. They are certainly a part of it, but they are not the whole.
Suppose, for instance, that you've been forced to stay up later than usual the past few days, and haven't gotten enough rest. Maybe you've only had five, six hours a night. we'll say. All other things being equal, the day after this streak of less-than-okay sleep, I anticipate that you'd find yourself working less than stellarly.
This has just about nothing to do with emotion. It has everything to do with your brain not getting all that it needs to function acceptably. Just replace “sleep” with “food” or “sex/human contact” and the idea would hold.
If the hardware isn’t running that well, I’d darn well say that regardless of how happy you might be on that day, your “mental state” is probably still below average.
To take the metaphor further: No matter how happy the IQ 70 child is about having received lots of chocolate on a particular day, one can’t really call her mental state a good one.
That is why I would’ve used “emotional state” in this writer’s place.
2. I’m going to point out that “mental states” are - for some people, yes - the end goal. That is not true for all people. This seems patently obvious to me.
Take anyone who donates large fractions of their incomes to charity. Their cutesy emotional state week-charts would be full of frowny faces! Sporadically (whenever they would do their donations), they would be happy, but that is not what they care about! That is not how this kind of person would evaluate their life! They would evaluate it by how much impact they had on the world, not by their happiness.
Though, for most people, sure, happiness is a pretty good measure of how well your life has been going.
3. I feel as though the super zoomed out looks at emotional states over the course of years is a little silly. The average of years worth of emotion… it just doesn’t seem to me like you could extract all that much out of the information, even if you did have a pretty good record (like a journal or something.)
Like, ideally, you’ll want to evaluate your emotional (and overall mental) state regularly so you can pivot towards better states as quickly as possible. You don’t, I don’t know, wait ‘till the end of each month to look back on your records and then decide what to do when you could’ve just looked at a week’s worth of data and come to the same conclusion. You wouldn’t wait a year to change when you could’ve made the same change with a month’s worth of info, yeah? Sure, go ahead and what the forest is to make sure that it’s not burning down, but you could probably just look at the trees in front of you to find that out instead.
4. Can I say, I just really like those drawings, they’re very cute and cool. The building blocks of each person’s life in the “Expanding the Metaphor” section was especially cool.
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Actionability-wise, keeping records of how well you were thinking and what you were feeling on a particular day is definitely useful information to keep.