[Buddha-l] buddhism and brain studies

[Richard Hayes]

On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 17:33 -0500, Alberto Todeschini wrote:

> As often, I can't quite make out what parts
> of your reply are to be taken literally and which are in jest.

I rarely reveal my actual thoughts on anything. I learned as a child to
keep my cards close to my jest.

>  I
> apologize if I'm mixing them up in what follows.

The odds are better than even that I am even more mixed up than you.

> So some countries allegedly
> have high happiness level but also high suicide levels.

This is hardly paradoxical, unless the the very people who are most
happy are the ones committing suicide. My guess (strictly amateurish, of
course, since I have no familiarity at all with thinking professionally
about anything) is that when everyone in the neighborhood is happy,
one's own unhappiness is all the more intolerable. As the Buddha said:
"Misery loves company. So join the Sangha."

> My point, which will probably sound like a platitude, is this: an
> issue that sounds absolutely obvious and unworthy of study may on
> closer examination prove to be surprising and worthy of further
> research.

In a moment of uncharacteristic sobriety of spirit, I agree with you
completely.

> Allow me to do a little reductionism: it is logically possible to
> agree to define happiness as a set of physiological states and be
> wrong about it.

Yes, but it is not logically possible to be mistaken about whether one
feels happy. And since there is no fact to the matter of whether anyone
actually IS happy, there can be no discrepancy between what one feels
and what is actually the case. What one feels IS actually the case.

>  Just as people intoxicated with alcohol have the
> (documented) tendency to underestimate their level of intoxication
> ("No, officer, really, I am sober!!") 

There is no parallelism at all between feeling happy and thinking that
one's blood alcohol level is above the legal limit. One can easily be
mistaken about the later, but it does not follow from that that one can
also be mistaken about the former. The case of blood alcohol level is a
matter of objective testing, whereas feeling happy is nothing but a
purely subjective feeling with no objective component whatsoever. It is
untestable, and therefore both unverifiable and unfalsifiable.

> You know, after some 8 year of Buddha-L I was almost certain that you
> would have commented on my remark.

As I am sure you have figured out by now, my only goal in life is to be
completely predictable to everyone. Good to see I am enjoying a measure
of success in achieving this goal. It makes me feel happy. Undeniably
so.

> On average, almost 5 hours a day of it. The book where I found
> reference to the study about happy people and suicide also has a
> chapter on the relationship between watching TV and happiness. In case
> anyone is interested, here it is: _Happiness: A Revolution in
> Economics_ MIT Press, 2008. Just one quote from p.105: "On average,
> ceteris paribus, people who spend a lot of time watching television do
> indeed report lower lifer satisfaction."

I have no trouble at all believing that. The only times in my life when
I have had suicidal thoughts have been immediately after watching Fox
News and stepping by mistake into a Wal-Mart center. Television and
shopping centers do not always make me suicidal, but they do plunge me
into temporary states of deep melancholy bordering on despair.

> Obligatory Buddhist reference: I'm interested in research on happiness
> for the same reason that I'm interested in Buddhism: I like the idea
> of reducing the amount of suffering that I and others encounter.

I also like the idea of reducing the amount of suffering that sentient
beings encounter, but approaching the matter systematically and
scientifically strikes me as a very unpromising approach. Concocting
operational definitions of what happiness is and then testing whether
people (or laboratory mice) meet the criteria set up by those
operational definitions is bad philosophy, bad science and bad Buddhism.
If you want to reduce misery, learn to believe in blind luck and then go
out and give food and shelter to homeless people you randomly encounter
on the streets. I bet they'll thank you for it.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico