Never give way to melancholy. Nothing encroaches more. I fight against it vigorously. One great remedy is, to take short views of life. Are you happy now ? Are you likely to remain so till tomorrow or next month, or next year ? Then why destroy present happiness by a distant misery which may never come at all, or you may never live to see ? For every substantial grief has twenty shadows, and many of them shadows of your own making.

Sydney Smith

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Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness

by Alva Noe

Hill and Wang, 2009

Review by Tuomas Manninen.

Sep 15th 2009 (Volume 13, Issue 38)

Put succinctly, what Alva Noë is offering in Out of Our Heads is nothing short of a paradigm shift, complete with an incisive criticism of the status quo of neurosciences and a suggestion for an alternative model. The scientific study of consciousness in general, and what Noë calls the establishment neuroscience in particular claims to have broken free from its philosophical foundations. Although Noë acknowledges that the problem of consciousness is a scientific problem, one for which a scientific answer should be expected, he challenges the scientific community’s contention that consciousness no longer remains a philosophical problem.

The key assumption behind the science of consciousness is that consciousness is an internal process that occurs in the brain. Noë’s chief goal in the book is to show that this highly questionable, yet unquestioned assumption, has led the consciousness research astray; in brief, the search for consciousness has focused on where it isn’t. Noë opens by challenging this assumption, and offers an alternative picture. Instead of characterizing consciousness as an internal process (like digestion) Noë proposes a picture which takes consciousness to be an activity (like dancing). To try to understand consciousness by just focusing on the brain’s neural activity is tantamount to trying to understand dancing strictly in terms of the muscles. In the latter case, the muscles certainly play a part in the explanation, but they can hardly be the entire story. Analogously for the explanation of consciousness: brain processes are a part of the story, but they are not the whole story, even if they have been given an undue amount of attention

More from Metapsychology here

Sometimes the 'mind-is-in-the-brain picture can be quite simplistic...

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Happiness: A buyer’s guide

Money can improve your life, but not in the ways you think

I’m not sure I buy into everything here, but I offer it as a further contribution to the occasional series on happiness I’ve been posting.

By Drake Bennett August 23, 2009

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Samuel Butler -Self Portrait

Always eat grapes downwards–that is, always eat the best grape first; in this way there will be none better left on the bunch, and each grape will seem good down to the last. If you eat the other way, you will not have a good grape in the lot. Besides, you will be tempting Providence to kill you before you come to the best.

This is why autumn seems better than spring: in the autumn we are eating our days downwards, in the spring each day still seems ‘very bad.’ People should live on this principle more than they do, but they do live on it a good deal; from the age of, say, fifty we eat our days downwards.

Samuel Butler (1832-1902)

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Continuing our series of discussions about the nature of happiness, here is a contribution from a philosopher. I’d say the happiness he describes here is only one of the varieties (and I don’t agree that the type described below was  Aristotle’s only idea about what happiness is – but it certainly gets my vote).

What is happiness? How does one get a grip on this most elusive, intractable and perhaps unanswerable of questions?

I teach philosophy for a living, so let me begin with a philosophical answer. For the philosophers of Antiquity, notably Aristotle, it was assumed that the goal of the philosophical life — the good life, moreover — was happiness and that the latter could be defined as the bios theoretikos, the solitary life of contemplation. Today, few people would seem to subscribe to this view. Our lives are filled with the endless distractions of cell phones, car alarms, commuter woes and the traffic in Bangalore. The rhythm of modern life is punctuated by beeps, bleeps and a generalized attention deficit disorder.

But is the idea of happiness as an experience of contemplation really so ridiculous? Might there not be something in it? I am reminded of the following extraordinary passage from Rousseau’s final book and his third (count them — he still beats Obama 3-to-2) autobiography, “Reveries of a Solitary Walker”:

If there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul. (emphases mine)

This is as close to a description of happiness as I can imagine. Rousseau is describing the experience of floating in a little rowing boat on the Lake of Bienne close to Neuchâtel in his native Switzerland. He particularly loved visiting the Île Saint Pierre, where he used to enjoy going for exploratory walks when the weather was fine and he could indulge in the great passion of his last years: botany. He would walk with a copy of Linneaus under his arm, happily identifying plants in areas of the deserted island that he had divided for this purpose into small squares.

Read more  here: Happy Like God – Happy Days Blog – NYTimes.com.

 -Simon Critchley

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Posted with the usual caveats about not taking evolutionary psychology at its own estimation. Still, rather interesting:

Would You Slap Your Father? If So, You’re a Liberal

(Nicholas D. Kristof in the New York Times)

Some evolutionary psychologists believe that disgust emerged as a protective mechanism against health risks, like faeces, spoiled food or corpses. Later, many societies came to apply the same emotion to social “threats.” Humans appear to be the only species that registers disgust, which is why a dog will wag its tail in puzzlement when its horrified owner yanks it back from eating excrement.

Psychologists have developed a “disgust scale” based on how queasy people would be in 27 situations, such as stepping barefoot on an earthworm or smelling urine in a tunnel. Conservatives systematically register more disgust than liberals. (To see how you weigh factors in moral decisions, take the testswww.yourmorals.org.) at

It appears that we start with moral intuitions that our brains then find evidence to support. For example, one experiment involved hypnotizing subjects to expect a flash of disgust at the word “take.” They were then told about Dan, a student council president who “tries to take topics that appeal to both professors and students.”

The research subjects felt disgust but couldn’t find any good reason for it. So, in some cases, they concocted their own reasons, such as: “Dan is a popularity-seeking snob.”

More here:

Op-Ed Columnist – Would You Slap Your Father? If So, You’re a Liberal – NYTimes.com.  (Take the tests, they are interesting)

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What is Happiness?

Below is an article that takes one of the popular modern approaches to the question of what makes us happy – and why. It’s certainly not a new field of enquiry. Every religion and philosophy has had something to say about it, if only to dismiss it as a serious topic. Not that many do that.

In the west alone we have a sustained investigation among the ancinet Greek and Roman philosophers, such as Epicurus (this is supposed to be what he looked like) and his followers, the Stoics, and a host of others.

I am most impressed with the Aristotlian idea  eudaimonea (worthwhile, flourishing, life) , but the general goal of many of them seems to be closer to Buddhism: ataraxia, or the state of being devoid of affect, desire – and anxiety. Not so much happiness as the avoidance of pain.

There’s also a political aspect to the question – what kinds of societies are those which promote human flourishing ?(assuming the aim is posed in such terms).

Perhaps though, Nietzsche was right when he said that happiness was not the goal of humans – only Englishmen. I doubt it though. Mind you, the thought is echoed by some Lacanians – not the bit about being English, but the idea that our goal is something other than pleasure, hedon.  Note how easy, and how misleadingly, we can slip from pleasure , conceived as a physical state,  to happiness, thought of as a way of life. They are clearly two different things. Perhaps further analysis would reveal that ‘other goal’ of the anti-hedon brigade to be, just a verson of eudaimonea? Not I suspect, the view that a Zizek or a Lacan would take. Think of their concept of the death drive, and the long shadow of Schopenhaurean pessimism that seems to accompany so much lacanian thought about the ‘ends of man’.

Whatever we take happiness to be, I do think the investigation is worthwhile (or I wouldnt be posting this). But I’d add a couple of caveats. One is that we ought not to allow economists to define happiness  for us. If we do that we are likely to end up with a crude version of utilitarianism – happiness as hedon, again. The other is that while we should follow the latest scinetific research (as below), we should not swallow the results – or the assumptions – uncritically.  Scientific research of the kind outlined below can be conducted in many ways, but it can lead the unwary into an ill considered reductionsm – of the kind that  assumes that a complex concept can always be  redescribed without loss  in entirely physical, biological manner; or into a set of speculations about our evolutionary past which resmble nothing so much as the Just-So stories of Kipling (how we came to need pleasure presented in the same manner as ‘how the leopard got his spots’). The former is part of the essence of scientific method, but needs to be balanced against other considerations; the latter is part of the current fashion for pseudo-darwinian ‘explanations’  for everything.

The Science of Lasting Happiness

Through controlled experiments, Sonja Lyubomirsky explores ways to beat the genetic set point for happiness. Staying in high spirits, she finds, is hard work

By Marina Krakovsky

Count your blessings every day? Not if you want to be really happy……Lyubomirsky had to lay some groundwork before she could go into the lab. Back then, happiness was “a fuzzy, unscientific topic,” she says, and although no instrument yet exists for giving perfectly valid, reliable and precise readings of someone’s happiness from session to session, Lyubomirsky has brought scientific rigor to the emerging field. From her firm belief that it is each person’s self-reported happiness that matters, she developed a four-question Subjective Happiness Scale. Lyubomirsky’s working definition of happiness–”a joyful, contented life”–gets at both the feelings and judgments necessary for overall happiness. (If a sleep-deprived new mom feels fulfilled but frazzled, and an aimless party girl feels empty despite loads of fun, neither would consider herself truly happy.) To this day, she rarely sees her studies’ participants; they do most exercises out in the real world and answer detailed questionnaires on the computer, often from home. To assess subjects’ efforts and honesty, she uses several cross-checks, such as timing them as they complete the questionnaires.

The research needed to answer questions about lasting happiness is costly, because studies need to follow a sizable group of people over a long time. Two and a half years ago Lyubomirsky and Sheldon received a five-year, $1-million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to do just that. Investigators have no shortage of possible strategies to test, with happiness advice coming “from the Buddha to Tony Robbins,” as Seligman puts it. So Lyubomirsky started with three promising strategies: kindness, gratitude and optimism–all of which past research had linked with happiness.

More from: The Science of Lasting Happiness: Scientific American.

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Fat chance. But here’s a small way towards helping you to value what you have got, and avoiding going all toxic about what you haven’t: counterfactualising downwards.

Counterfactual: the way things might have been. As in: counterfactual history (e.g. if Hitler had invaded Britain, if Margaret Thatcher had stepped in front of a bus in 1978 etc).

When we imagine how our lives could have been better (that job, that salary, if only he/she had fancied me, why don’t I have a better car -or why do the bad guys not step under buses? etc..) we are counterfactualising upwards .

But when we think how much worse things could have been we go the other way. And let’s face it, for most of us in the developed world things could have been much worse. For a start, just being in the developed world makes most of us part of the global super rich anyway. But think closer to home: haven’t you been lucky? This is not an invitation to smugness: a lot is joyfulness and gratitude, you miserable so-and-so? luck, isn’t it? Go on, be honest. How about some

So counterfactualise downwards, friends. Believe me, it’s good for mental health.

Of course, the pitfall to avoid now is sour grapes (‘Since I’m not going to get it, I never wanted that nice thing, anyway..), but that’s another story, and maybe another post.

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