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Notes -
What is best in life?
It’s odd that this question never comes up, because both culture and politics hinge on an image of the ideal life. Ostensibly, humans want to maximize the greatness of their life. Or, we can say they want to maximize the “enjoyment” of their life, where enjoyment refers to the full spectrum of experiences (rather than just vices as it sometimes colloquially means). If you were to imagine a hypothetical person with enough money to spend his life however he wants, what would this person do to maximize his “having lived well”? What does his life consist of? We can imagine that if this ideally-lived person were at a dinner party, he would not wish to replace his life with anyone else present ever — this is what we mean by ideal. We can also imagine that a reasonable person would be convinced of the superiority of his lived life.
Emotions > Information
After considering this question, I came to interesting conclusions, which are perhaps interesting enough to post. The emotional life, or the “felt” life, has all the significance. When we study mathematics or get into programming, the fruit of our labor is a feeling. We stumble upon a beauty and order in mathematics, which is a felt experience. Or we reach a catharsis from solving a programming problem, which is also a felt experience. The value is not in the information or specifics per se; were a person to be put on an antagonist of the opioid or dopamine or serotonin receptor and were numb to the enjoyable emotional state, we would conclude they experienced nothing of value.
This means that mathematics and all “informational” learning is only valuable insofar as it induces great emotion, where the ideal life is concerned. If you could conceivably experience a greater variation of beauty and order from something outside of mathematics (which may not be the case, or it may be the case), then even learning math would be unnecessary to experience the ideal life. Put another way, if we are measuring someone’s life by their experience of beauty, then we care only about the felt experience of beauty, and not its intellectual antecedents or mental symbols. Someone whose brain cannot process the enjoyment of music would have no benefit from reading the sheet music of Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion (the antecedent); and similarly, someone who can already fully appreciate the music (the consequent enjoyment) gets no value from knowing the sheet music. And so the ideal life must consist of rich emotional or felt states — interpreted broadly as “mental states which affect our emotional life”, so as to include experiences of order and beauty and the sublime.
Memory of Experience > Experience
I realized also, that memory is crucial to the ideal life. If we compare two men, and one of them experienced great states and has a clear memory of them, and the other experienced one greater state and has a poor memory, the former man has lived a better life. The fact that we intuitively see that having great memories is important to maximize the enjoyment of life actually tells us something profound about what we value: contemplation. We would rather live the life of the person who has experienced 99% enjoyment of ten things than 100% enjoyment of one. We would rather be the person at the pub telling us about his many adventures than the person who is currently climbing Everest experiencing the one great adventure of his life.
So the contemplation of our experiences is crucial. And there’s another way to prove this: who has a greater appreciation for a loved one, than the person who knows the loved one most? Having a deep memory of a person is necessary to fully appreciate them. So it is with appreciating a book, album, or story. We would not want to be an emotionally sensitive but senseless child with memory loss, who experiences wonder and beauty for the first time every day, because the inability to know and contemplate these things is the inability to fully appreciate them.
The Emotions that Matter
To me, it’s actually obvious which emotions are great, because human societies have come to general conclusions on this no matter the time period. There’s the experience of deep serenity and peace and security, which can come through family and certain rituals and prayer. There’s the experience of Power or the Sublime which often induces a state of pleasant fear and fuller appreciation of living itself. There’s the experience of order which leaves us relieved and satisfied and warm. There’s beauty which entrances us, and the experience of love and belonging and connection which warms us. There are, IMO, certain general patterns and there’s little reason to reinvent the wheel here. Although I’d say, the satiation of our appetite for food and sex is considerably less important than the amount of thought we give it. For one, it goes away as soon as we are fulfilled. Food then should be associated with memories to enhance those memories, and sex should be associated with love to enhance our bonds.
The Training of Memory
As I’ve determined for myself that emotions are what matter, and what’s more that the contemplation of our emotional experiences are most important, I reasoned that the organization and training of emotional memory is necessary for the ideal life. It’s not enough to have a memory, if that memory is not accessible in the mind. It’s not enough to experience a good thing, if we don’t devote it to memory. Scott had mentioned in a post of his on depression that there’s a failure to update negative priors after a positive experience — there’s a failure to actually learn from the positive experience, to remember, to cohere it into the mind, and to update the prediction model of the world. The experience goes right through us and this is what makes depression so, well, depressing. On the other side of the coin, there is research on experienced “lovingkindness” meditator Matthieu Ricard whose brain shows changes that suggest a greater capacity for joy. That you can practice the memory and skills related to positive emotions is not exactly a new thought in the history of Western and Eastern religion. But for how important it is to ideal living, it’s little mentioned.
Problemata
If great, heightened experiences of varied things is so important, why doesn’t everyone do drugs? Should everyone try opium once in their life to experience a deep relaxation? And to this I say… maybe? If we know for sure that a person would not get addicted to opium, then there’s a legitimate value in trying it once to develop a memory of the deepest depths of peace. I would say the same with marijuana and alcohol and tobacco. But the ideal application of drugs is not the real world. Because everyone can fall into addiction, these things have to be used with extreme caution or not at all.
If personal enjoyment is so important, then what’s the point of a social life? To this I say, that socializing produces unique and more expedient enjoyments. We learn about enjoyment from socializing. And what about the obligation to have children? I would say that children are remarkable because they are little microcosms of human life, and by raising a child you can come to experience greater fullness of life’s enjoyments.
Your screed runs long so I did not read,
But I'll chase you down upon my steed,
For all the earth in every nation,
Knows well your womens lamentation.
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I disagree with your framing of internal experience being the end all be all. One of the core parts of having a good life, in my opinion, is helping to better the great project of humanity, or sentient beings, or order over chaos, whatever you want to call it.
If you only prize internal states, this means the opiate addicted guy who is happy with his life is just as good as a saint spending their whole life trying to better humanity. Seems wrong to say they have equally good lives.
If doing good to others were the ideal life, then a world where everyone focuses on doing good to others is an ideal life. But if we try to imagine a world where everyone, all day, tries to relentlessly find something good to do for someone else, with no time for anyone in this world to actually enjoy something, then it sounds like hell. By doing good to others, don’t we mean helping them to experience good emotional states? If those people feel that they have a relentless obligation to do good, then we are actually reducing their ability to experience good emotional states.
Are "good emotional states" simply a matter of a specific configuration of chemicals in the brain, or do they arise from material facts? I would argue the latter. We don't actually have a way to engineer full, holistic "good emotional states" in people outside of helping them create an actual good life. When we imagine various ways to reduce this to an engineering/tech problem, we tend to recoil in horror from the idea, seeing it as deeply inhuman.
It seems to me that "good emotional states" are best thought of as an indicator light, not the thing to be measured.
But it appears to me that an actual good life consists in the acquisition of great, powerful, significant, noteworthy emotional states. A life where you enter a forest and don’t feel awe, or look at a partner and don’t feel love, is miserable. What’s the point of hiking a mountain if you feel nothing during and after? That’s exactly depression, considered the worst state. The crucial ingredient is surely the emotional consequent. So if we say “a good life consists of material events”, I think we’re forgetting that every good material event is considered such because of its downstream emotional effect. That’s not to deny that nearly every emotional state arises from physical experiences and events. That’s certainly true.
As an example, I would rather be a poor beggar who can feel “positive” emotional states, than the richest man in the world who only has dulled emotions. To bring history into the discussion, this is a huge point in Abrahamic and Buddhist thought. And consider this illuminating example: in religious history you’ve had some monks experience religious ecstasy. This is considered a very desirable and euphoric state, and sometimes results in the person developing a life of holiness and prosociality. But the simple existence of such a state, I think, proves the value of emotionality and that it doesn’t necessary depend entirely on material conditions or physical events.
The Nozickian pleasure machine thought experiment is probably the best disproof of my ideas, but I think this is complicated by some things. There’s a residue of distrust when we think about man-made contraptions that colors our intuition on “perfect hedonism” simulation machines. There’s also the knowledge of the simulation that negatively colors our intuition, and an “under-determined” valuation of the natural world that humans rationally hold (we are created by nature and nature is likely superior to everything we can make). So our intuition on the “pleasure machine” is colored by our implicit distrust of the man-made and our inability to imagine ourselves in a perfect hedonic state, plus our intellectual knowledge that we’d “lose touch” with real living loved ones. So I’m unsure if we can actually trust our intuition on this example. Imagine instead, if an omnipotent God told us that He would lift us and our loved ones to a paradisal plane. I think a lot more people would be willing to do this, because (1) we intuit that Gods are natural/trustful/“the real deal”, (2) we bring our loved ones. So I’m not sure if the machine debunks my idea that emotionality is central: we feel negative emotion at the thought of getting into the machine for a couple of reasons, and it’s arguably impossible for a human to imagine his entire being put into perfect experiential enjoyment.
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This "ostensibly" is doing quite a bit of work.
Trying to answer "what is good in life" with any rigour is not possible in the format of a board like this. You may equally try to answer in the same space a question like "by the way, what actually is everything?"
To avoid condescension and make clear what I mean, let's even tease apart your first postulate here:
Why is the goodness or otherwise of life applicable to groups of "humans" rather than individuals? Now it might be or it might not, I'm not taking a position, just pointing out that you're implicitly smuggling in a sort of moral realism here, a sense that "the good" is a discoverable truth that's the same for many people, as opposed to say an "invented" individual preference or something else.
The Good is what people want, really? Is that the relation you're grounding it in? You sure? What about people who want bad things etc. Okay, so we'll only trust the wanting of sensible people. But how do we decide which reasonable group's wanting we should trust to define the Good, when the Good itself is the criterion we'll have to use to define reasonableness? (This is close to something called the Euthyphro problem, FYI)
Do they? What does "maximisation" really mean here, is this like arithmetical summing of good to get the most utils? What's the conversion ratio of big boons to little ones? How many fun nights out does it take to equal me bearing a child?
Is this just a synoym for "the Good"? If not, what is it?
Usw, the point is getting clear now!
It’s definitely possible to discourse on it with sufficient rigor to come away with more clarity than before. The Socratic dialogues are essentially that; the Summa is almost that. We’re not trying to Wittgenstein our postulates together to form a Tractatus. The alternative of never (not once) attempting to circumscribe how humans should live means we will forever be doomed to uncertainty on political or cultural shoulds.
That many different cultures developed to include the promotion of certain emotional states and the negation of other emotional states is evidence that humans are sufficiently similar that we can talk about them as a class. We can also use words that describe the deeper patterns of the human condition, like “desire” and “satisfaction” and “memory” to make progress on the question. Further, we can look at human narratives of people who have positive “life-changing realizations”: what do these have in common? Generally an aversion to addictions and an attraction to “deeper” emotional states involving gratitude and awe. And the science of well-being supports this. We can also ask, “when humans feel that their life is missing something, what do they generally desire more of?” You don’t have a lot of people lament that they have too few addictions or pains, or too many good memories with friends. These clue us into universal patterns of the human condition.
That’s not quite my view. “We can imagine that if this ideally-lived person were at a dinner party, he would not wish to replace his life with anyone else present ever — this is what we mean by ideal. We can also imagine that a reasonable person would be convinced of the superiority of his lived life.” So it’s not about want exactly. When we’re confronted with another person we can judge their way of life. Most reasonable people have had the experience of meeting people who are living better than themselves and living worse. For instance, someone who loves video games might meet someone whose happiness comes off as much greater; even though he personally wants to play video games, he senses a superior way of life. I think this is a universal experience. When people watch David Goggins, they don’t want to do what he does, but they want to want to do what he does. Something something Lacanian desire.
Phrased like this it seems paradoxical, but we can determine reasonableness by the ability to make accurate predictions. This is really the problem of all authority, not just “authority on the good”. I trust that the bridge won’t collapse, but isn’t this a case of “trusting the reasonable group’s [definition of] the reasonable”, namely bridge construction)? But we don’t even need to “trust a group”; an inquiry into the Good can be used by an individual subjectively to determine what is best for himself given the arguments available. Almost every reasonable person upon reading the scientific papers today would say that awe and gratitude are positive emotions to cultivate — this is not just common subjective sense, but evidenced from testimonies and major world religions. The paradox is interesting to dwell on but not actually applicable to how humans make decisions in the real world, no? But I could be misunderstanding the heart of the argument.
Can i just say, absolute banger of a reply (and definitely better than chatGPT, to whose writing I've been comparing literally everything else today)
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Yeah drugs have too many downsides. Too many lives destroyed by them. Even if you do not consume to excess, coming off them sucks. I got mildly drunk awhile back and it felt great. Except the next morning being too nauseous to fall asleep and really tired . not worth it.
Depends on your mindset and who you are. I myself and many others have had extremely profound and positive transformations through recreational drug use.
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Not clear to me this is true. Seems like this requires the assumption that there is great inter-subjective agreement on what it means for life to be ideal. I think that assumption is broadly false. That is, I can imagine two (or more) people who are living lives ideally in their own subjective evaluation, yet live very different lives, and neither would trade their life for the other's life.
The rest of the post I think is projecting your own preferences onto other people. It is not hard for me to imagine an individual who, for example, prefers living in the moment and having vivid present subjective experiences as opposed to having lesser experiences but being able to reflect on them more accurately. Or someone who enjoys having an experience of righteous anger at injustice more than a sense of peace or tranquility.
Re: someone who prioritizes living in the moment, would this person choose to lose his memory entirely in exchange for greater one-time experiences? I think we can determine that even such a person greatly values his collection of subjective experiences (memories). A complete discounting of memory would entail an almost suicidal drive toward a single great experience with no concern for the future, because future is a prediction based on memory. We’re back to a hypothetical: is the person who is dancing naked in the rain right now eternally better lived than the person who danced in the rain 100 times in the past? The idea behind favoring the latter person is that we value the enjoyments of memory. Vivid present subjective experiences are savored by memory, which is why people collect and remember them, and would not choose to eliminate their memory if they could. (At least in my experience, everyone I know who is adventurous treasures their memories).
Re: someone who loves righteous anger, should we trust his own knowledge of what is greatest to experience? For instance, there are alcoholics is who truly believe a good life consists of getting drunk. Should we say they are right or wrong? To me, someone who loves to only experience righteous anger sounds inhuman — I would rather say they don’t actually know what is greatest for their own enjoyment.
If we want to take this to extremes I think the extreme end of having a memory but lacking present experience would also be bad. Imagine someone who can experience no joy, no passion, no pleasure contemporaneous with their experience but only by remembering it later. Does that person have an ideal life? It seems to me like it would be quite bad! Being unable to enjoy the pleasure of sex, while having it. Or the beauty of a painting or piece of music while experiencing it. Only having vivid memories of these things and not emotionally fulfilling contemporaneous experiences seems quite un-ideal.
Taking this route seems like it requires the ideal life consisting in something other than the subjective evaluation of the individual living the life. In which case, in what does it consist? What makes you right about enjoying righteous anger being an un-ideal way to live? Why isn't it you who are wrong and they who are right?
Memory and experience are not mutually exclusive. To have a great memory of an ideal experience, you need to experience the present sharply.
Do you think a reasonable person would choose to live a life filled with anger? Do such people report high life satisfaction? Do we have records of people giving up not for more anger, or do we have the opposite? Do major world religions prioritize anger over other emotions? No reasonable person would decide to prioritize only anger in his life, and we know this because no reasonable person has ever done so.
The criticism denies that there can be any improvement in mood or life satisfaction. But reasonable people decide all the time to focus on improving their mood and life satisfaction, and they don’t pick “maximum anger”.
I agree but this seems in tension with your OP. In that post you posit a tradeoff between memory and quality of experience and come down on the side of memory. If your argument instead is that people with a good memory must, by necessity, have a high quality experience as well that seems quite different than the description in the OP. If this is the case, why isn't it that people with a certain quality of experience must also have a certain quality of memory?
What do you mean by "reasonable?" Why do only the evaluations of "reasonable" people matter?
I have no idea. Should I take this question as indicating that if they did report high life satisfaction, you would agree they were living an ideal life? Is an ideal life, then, whatever causes one to self-report high life satisfaction?
I don't know why either of these are relevant. The fact that some people change from being filled with righteous anger to being some other way or that world religions don't counsel living this way don't seem relevant to evaluating the question of whether someone could live this way and be satisfied with their life.
Citation?
I don't understand how my criticism denies there can be improvement. My point is that whether someone's life is "ideal" is based on the evaluation of the individual who is living the life in question. As you note, people evaluate their own lives as un-ideal all the time! I don't understand how my criticism is incompatible with this fact.
If you had a son, and your son was fine with living a life as a Minecraft server admin, would you (or any other person in the world who you believe is a reasonable judge) be fine with this life decision as well? What about your friend? What if he claimed he was fine living a life that centered around huffing paint? Wouldn’t we intervene on this friend’s life choice, because we believe a sane person wouldn’t center life on insignificance and huffing paint? Similarly, if our friend was yelling at a wall all day every day, and when we asked him about this he says “I am experiencing heightened righteous anger”, we would call a doctor to come and interfere in his life choice.
What I’m saying boils down to: our actions in the real world prove that we trust the assessments of reasonable people on matters of mood , not in every case but in cases. And we believe in clear things that are bad (regarding emotional states). The class of people who we agree are reasonable on matters of life decisions (the “reasonable person” which our entire justice system revolves around) will overwhelmingly believe: living is good, an alcoholic life is bad, certain emotional states are desirable. Is this not so? If it’s so, then we can’t trust an unreasonable person’s assessment on their life quality.
The problem is that the last two sentences of the first paragraph of your OP are in tension with each other. You write:
The first sentence is about the subjective evaluation of the person living the life on their own life. Specifically, that they would not trade that life for any other person's life. The second sentence is about the hypothetical evaluation of a reasonable person, that a reasonable person would want that life.
I think there are many examples of lives that are one or the other of these, but not both. Lots of people probably want to be rich or be celebrities or whatever and those same celebrities wish their lives were other than they are. Lots of people probably would not trade their lives for a different life, but the hypothetical reasonable person evaluating their life from the outside would not want it.
What I'm looking for is some clarity in what it means to be "ideal." Is it the subjective evaluation of the person living the life? Is it the judgment of the hypothetical reasonable observer?
Your comment here seems to be assuming the "ideal" life (or, at least, the "un-ideal" life) is the result of the inter-subjective agreement of "reasonable" people. I do not think that is a very good criterion. Not least because that inter-subjective agreement can and has changed. Once upon a time "reasonable" people would have regarded "being gay" in a similar way as your examples of huffing paint or being a Minecraft server admin. Even today in some countries or cultural contexts they still would. Is it impossible, then, to live an ideal life while being gay? Was it the case that it is impossible to live an ideal life as a gay person in a community where reasonable people regard being gay as unideal, but it's possible to live an ideal life as a gay person in a community where they don't regard being gay as unideal?
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The article you linked doesn’t say anything about memory. Can you cite where that’s mentioned?
This should be obvious by context, but the discussion has never come up on themotte. We’ve had dozens of posts on repetitive topics like the plague of homeless people and the transgender question, but not many that actually try to discuss things from the topic.
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