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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.
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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