We're not (really) thinking
This thread buds off of this one :point: Is depression the default human state? by @TiredThinker
1. If we really think about the world, our world, we must necessarily be melancholic (the amount of evil, all things considered, exceeds the amount of good).
2. We're not melancholic, in fact we go about our daily business as if we're in jannat more or less.
Ergo,
3. We're not (really) thinking. [1, 2 Modus Tollens]
Sorry René Descartes!
1. If we really think about the world, our world, we must necessarily be melancholic (the amount of evil, all things considered, exceeds the amount of good).
2. We're not melancholic, in fact we go about our daily business as if we're in jannat more or less.
Ergo,
3. We're not (really) thinking. [1, 2 Modus Tollens]
Sorry René Descartes!
Comments (49)
2. Who is Jannet? :D
3. Thinking can make you happy or sad depending on subject matter and knowledge.
I think ‘happiness’ is a trivial thing tbh. Humans seem to excel when challenged rather than sitting in paradise idly playing with themselves.
The main item I’ve found to be the cause of ‘displeasure’ is fear. Fear stops us from trying. If we don’t try then the dark clouds form.
You need to make the case that this true. You seem to be appealing to a form of common sense - that this must be how people would feel about the world. Nevertheless I know plenty of people who have every reason to think all is hopeless and yet they are cheerful.
This describes moral judgement, which is a particularly affected, reductionist mode of thinking - among many other ways of thinking about the world.
Melancholy appears. Longing back to paradise. Every sane person has to be depressed. Let's not fool ourselves.
Non cogito ergo sum
Good call!
The average happiness score is 5.53 out of a maximum of 10 (see here). That's like scoring just a little above 50% in an an exam. That's an F in academics.Fail!
Quoting Possibility
How so?
Depression is feeling extremely low for no viable reason. It is a chemical imbalance (physical brain condition) rather than feeling sad/upset about something in your life.
That's what they make you think. Lost paradise is the cause. I've had my part. All stuff tried. To no avail. I have very highs luckily too. Let me tell you, already in locked up in the school system when a small kid I longed to something that wasnt there. Despite being the best in class and girls walking behind my ass.
Our ignorance? About what?
If you are a dualist there is probably not a discussion worth having here, sorry.
“The amount of evil, on balance, exceeds the amount of good.”
This assertion is based on an assumption that ALL thinking about the world is reducible to either a positive or negative relation (of the thinker) to just one quantifiable quality of the world.
Quoting Agent Smith
This data you provided as ‘evidence’ would suggest the opposite to your premise - that our relation to the world is, on balance, more positive than negative. So, it seems you are contradicting yourself - despite your apologist-style attempt to reframe the data.
Physiology not separate from brain function? How can it be separate from brain function? The brain, the body, and he universe are tightly bound. Inseparably even. The physiology of the brain and its connections to body and universre determines your thoughts and feelings.
How would you go about dealing with the world if not in terms of opposites?
Quoting Possibility
Can you explain how an F on your paper is anything to smile about? :chin:
Don't underestimate your own abilities. Let the enemy do that. :grin:
PSR violated! Interesting! :chin:
You can say that again! :up:
Turns out you were correct!
Yeah, I've figured out a way to never be wrong, or positively, to be always right! :wink:
Am I right or am I right! Absolutely not. So I must be right :)
This has nothing to do with an F on any imaginary paper - it has to do with your assertion that “the amount of evil, on balance, exceeds the amount of good”. According to this data, it doesn’t.
Quoting Agent Smith
In thinking about the world, I would recommend a triadic relation. It’s ultimately more stable and verifiable.
Possibility does this by sidestepping the question and saying something that looks like it means something but then seems utterly incapable of offering any ‘verification’ for their pretend point … because there isn’t one.
They have probably read too much Heidegger, Foucault or Derrida. Or nothing other than one of those.
The max score is 10. The average is 5.53. What am I missing here? Something surely! If you had a class of students sit for a test and the average score was 5.53, that means your class did badly, oui? I was trying to put things in perspective. Perhaps you'll fare better in doing that! Give it a go.
Quoting Possibility
Expand and elaborate, keep in mind that we're talking about happiness and sorrow, the in-between state most likely is contentment or thereabouts. The figures that I provided were measures of happiness.
Let's work this out togther if it is at all possible.
1. Happiness
2. Sorrow
3. ?
No, no, I'd like to do some exploring, I hope Possibility doesn't mind a little "probing" :grin: I'm not a man and neither am I woman, something in the middle (triadic).
What really makes life suck is only partially brain ghosts I come up with, as well as seeing the bad stuff around me. Real shit that hits the fan hurts like hell. And hey, all stuff when you think about the world aint bad. You don’t run around doing that balance stuff. If I was to say if World is a good or bad place, I couldnt answer
And when I REALLY think hard, solving problems, write texts, reads and analyzes what i have read, I cannot be in a better place.
Either happiness is subjective or objective. No one, as per Wikipedia, wants to get hooked up to an experience machine. In other words...
They did ‘badly’ according to whom? An academic standard? What does that have to do with happiness? If the highest possible score was 10 (infinite happiness) and the lowest possible score was 0 (infinite sorrow), then anything above 5 would be, ON BALANCE, more happiness than sorrow. It’s not that complicated.
Quoting Agent Smith
For any two distinct members of a linear continuum, there exists a third member that is strictly between these (Peirce). The third member in this case is the relative position of the thinker - closer to ‘happiness’ than to ‘sorrow’, according to your data.
So, you would be happy to get an F (0 - 59%) on your report card? :chin: It doesn't make sense, something's off, no?
Quoting Possibility
First, how is the tertium quid closer to happiness?
Second, explain how my data proves your point? I don't see it, at all!
Third, expand and elaborate on triadism, it looks interesting. Also, before you dive into an exposition, can you also touch upon dualism. Do you know anything about advaita.
I can comprehend, obviously, that dualism is about two opposing cum complemenatary entities/forces. Is that all there is to dualism? If yes, I'm a little disappointed, it seems to be missing a critical quality viz. mono no aware. :yawn:
”Happiness” seems a bit too simple to describe the OP. And even if one talked about happiness, dividing it into subjective OR objective seems a bit simplistic too. We do have our own feelings and experiences, shared and polluted by the other, by all kind of puclic opinions and sentiments.
Where do you wanna start?
Is it possible that
1. If we're depressed, then we're thinking
Mind you, people who're suffering from immediate causes such as disease, hunger, poverty, marginalization, don't count.
Hey, that means I'm right after all. The top 10 happiest countries (all European) shouldn't exist. They people of these nations should be sad as hell too.
Europeans are not thinking? The motherlode of global innovation and they're sleep walking.
Sorry for the flip-flop, building my case on the fly. It's clear enough for those with a modicum of horse sense.
The journey and all that. Common phrase likely because it is true that we enjoy the act of doing something more than the actual achievement.
Darwinian take: only things that are good for evolutionary success (basically reproduction) would have found their into our brain reward system. Ergo, if you get a kick out of x, x is good for sex! :joke: I don't see how locking yourself up in a room for 7 consecutive days playing world of warcraft makes for a great sex life? Something went wrong as my browser keeps telling me every now and then.
I think it would be better to say that instead of not thinking the people are wilfully ignorant
Quoting Ansiktsburk
I hear ya!
Keep that horse running wildly my love! Let's ride the untamed horse of reality without a damned saddle, without the bridles! Jippiyajay!
In general, should people be happy or sad, given how the world is and how it works? If the world is predominantly evil, then people should be in the grips of depression most if not all the time. In case there's more good than evil, we can expect the majority to be upbeat about life.
Are people actually happy or sad? I tried to look for data
and what I found was that the average happiness score for the world is 5.53 out of a maximum of 10. If the world were a class of pupils, the average grade for the class is an F (0 - 59%). That looks bad/black.
Conclusion: There's more evil than good in the world. That explains the low mean happiness score of 5.53.
There are multiple issues with my analysis if we could call it that. As @Ansiktsburk was good enough to bring to my attention: it maybe simplistic ( :down: ) rather than simple ( :up: ).
Quoting EugeneW
:lol:
Oh my god! - WHAT report card? This is apologistic nonsense. Where I come from anything above 50% is considered a ‘pass’, but that’s honestly beside the point...
Quoting Agent Smith
Every countably infinite subset of the continuum that has an upper bound (happiness = 10) has a least upper bound (sorrow = 0). Which would make a potential midway point (neither happiness nor sorrow) = 5. A score of 5.53 would therefore be positioned closer to happiness than to sorrow. I can’t believe I’m having to explain this...
Quoting Agent Smith
Dualism is a belief/doctrine that reality is fundamentally composed of two parts. It is missing a critical quality, rendering it essentially unverifiable. You can reduce reality to pretty much any two concepts as fundamentally ‘opposing’, and there is no way to confirm or deny their accuracy as such.
Advaita, or non-dualism, basically recognises one of them as illusion, or a limited aspect of what is essentially a monism.
Triadism is a way of thinking about reality in terms of stable, self-critical systems, inclusive of the embodied thinker, who recognises himself as an interacting aspect of reality. The ideal triadic system works towards a perfect symmetry, enabling the thinker to embody any of the three aspects in order to grasp a complete and unlimited understanding of the system as a whole.
(3) should be "we're not really thinking about the world."
:up: Another qualification that I failed to make. So, my thesis is improving, won't you say? With help from you all of course. Arigato gozaimus.
Quoting Possibility
Yeah, I was wondering about that, but it's not my idea. Visit the Wikipedia page on US students' grading system. Are you saying the US educational board/council/committee is spouting "apologistic (?) nonsense"? Can you explain why it's "apologisitc (?) nonsense"? Remember there's a range (0 - 59%) that's "awarded" F.
Quoting Possibility
That's an excellent observation. 5.53 is closer to 10 than 0 (it's past the midpoint 5). However this average happiness score looks to be the median and not the mean. Half of the world's countries score less than 5.53 and you'll have to remember that most of them are highly populous nations (Asia & Africa). In terms of actual numbers that could mean two-thirds of the world i.e. approx. 5.3 billion people out of a total of 8 billion are having a hard time. Evil > Good.
1. Dualism: Hot - Cold [extrema]
2. Triadism: Hot - x - Cold. What's the x? Lukewarm/tepid? Isn't lukewarm/tepid just hot interacting with cold and reaching an equilibrium point? The lukewarm, like dissipated heat or 0 between + and - does nothing. The third state in triadism is static, inert, noble! Tepid water isn't a "force" for lack of a better term, it's, to put it colorfully, a dead battery with a potential of 0 volts!
The number 5.53 points to virtual people. Actual people have values above and below 5. A relative very high number of people have a lucky number below 5. Which means, they are unhappy. If you asked the luck question 10 000 years ago, when paradise was still paradise, a relative small number of people would have a luck value below 5. If they even understood the question. They were just happy.
Do we take a happiness poll seriously? That aside, looks like this one tells us happiness comes from a solid welfare safety net and political stability. It doesn't seem to be about reflecting on evil or facts in the world. It seems to say that happiness is local and politically determined.
You are missing the importance of interpretation of events in the development of happiness or melancholy. As the cognitive behavioral thinkers suggest it is not experiences themselves which lead to emotional states but the thoughts which a person has about the experiences.
This can be habitual and cumulative, resulting in a particular state of mind and there is the possibility of reframing events in order to change emotions, but it may not be easy to achieve, especially the biological manifestation of unhappiness and sadness into clinical depression. It is this complexity which leads to a need for a combination of medication and other therapeutic options.
How much do polls reflect the actual state of affairs? I guess there are many stages in a poll where mistakes can occur and the common ones have already been discovered and addressed. It's the errors that we're not aware of that can gum up the works. Here we're treading on the frontiers of statistics and study/survey design. I haven't the foggiest as to how we should go about it. For now, let's just accept that, like in all things, there are limitations to polls and we will draw our conclusions cautiously, with great care.
I've read that Scandinavian countries (the happiest nations according to the polls) have a social welfare scheme that's the best in the world and add to that the political stability these European nations enjoy and we have a recipe for happiness. I'm not sure what works for Scandinavians will work for every other people. Will this model also function as effectively in say Africa or Asia? Your guess is as good as mine.
Quoting Jack Cummins
Indeed Jack Cummins, happiness does have a subjective component and we may be able to make ourselves happier just by recalibrating our attitude but I have a feeling this can't be done indefintely or in all situations. For example it doesn't look like we can maintain a cheerful mood in a war zone surrounded by death and destruction.
Also what of the correlation between objectively measurable parameters such as nutrition, health, political stability and overall well-being of people as found in the happiest countries?
Good question. Probably somewhere in the reigion of un-happyness and in the region of meaning. Maslow territory.
Although, prima facie, Maslow's hierarchy of needs makes complete sense - it jibes with our intuitions - I found out it has many critics. That said, the mistakes it supposedly makes doesn't seem to amount to a death blow if you catch my drift.
As regards the OP, all I can say at this moment is people who're suffering (unfulfilled needs in Maslow's world) simply don't have the time or resources to think (well) like, say, a well-paid professor of philosophy in a university somewhere.
It's a vicious cycle as I once pointed out: suffering [math]\to[/math] can't think [math]\to[/math] suffering [math]\to[/math] can't think...