[Buddha-l] buddhism and brain studies

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 12:06 -0500, Alberto Todeschini wrote:

> Sounds right to me. I've recently come across a study according to
> which happy people are less likely to commit suicide. Some may discard
> this as, er..., bleeding obvious but there's nothing like the
> imprimatur of science even on the obvious.

About ten years ago I had the good fortune to preside over a PhD thesis
defense in which a psychologist earned his sheepskin by managing to show
hard data suggesting that males between the ages of 19 and 22 become
less inhibited when they have consumed the equivalence of four or five
bottles of Canadian lager. I can't tell you how relieved I was to
discover that science had finally confirmed another bit of
folk-psychology that had previously been known only to poets,
playwrights, country and western singer-songwriters, Baptist preachers
and Theravādin monks.

>  I wouldn't be at
> all surprised -and in fact am inclined to believe- that people tend to
> say they are happier than they are.

You don't need a psychologist. You need a philosopher who can help you
understand that happiness does not exist at all except as a purely
subjective state about which it is logically impossible to be mistaken.
Of course people can lie about their subjective states. Men, for
example, lie about being in love if telling such a lie may enhance their
prospects of having an orgasm in the near future. But people do not lie
unless they stand to earn either sex or money for it. Now it turns out
there is no financial or sexual advantage in lying about one's
happiness. On the contrary, one is more likely to get paid or laid if
one feigns being a little depressed and in need of cheering up.
Therefore, people do not lie about being happy. When someone says "I'm
happy," you can believe it.

> I hope I'm not going to offend anyone but I find American society
> (where I've been living for some years now) as a whole to be
> particularly fake.

You find that American society is particularly fake because American
society IS particularly fake. There is no authenticity at all in
American society. That's because Americans watch TV. You don't need
scientifically gathered data to show that there is a deep correlation
between watching television and being incapable of any form of
sincerity.

>  That's, of course, a generalization against which I
> know plenty of individual exceptions. 

The exceptions are all illusions. The fact is that all
television-watching Americans, without exception, are phony.

> I have doubts about America ranking as one of
> the happiest countries on earth.

Why? It is well know that the single greatest source of genuine
happiness is being insincere and inauthentic. So when Americans say they
are happy, they are not only telling you the truth, but they are also
showing you how to become happy yourself: become a charlatan.

Richard