Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Happiness is nature’s reward for doing things that further the survival of the species (and our own genetic code.) Happiness is the carrot at the end of the stick that drives us to increase our chances to survive and mate. Unhappiness, of course, is the stick itself, which nature beats us with if the carrot doesn’t sufficiently motivate us.
If you could never be happy or unhappy, then you would be almost catatonic. After all, why do anything if it doesn’t change the way you feel? If there’s no physical or mental discomfort involved in not eating, not sleeping, and not getting up to use the bathroom, then why would you? The only reason would be to go through the motions. Similarly, if nothing made you happy (in any of its iterations–no pleasure, no sense of interest, no desire) then why even move? It wouldn’t change anything. Perhaps reason alone, or some other emotion separate from happiness/unhappiness (curiosity? duty?) might make us move around and do things. But perhaps not.
The point is that happiness/unhappiness is a trick nature plays on us to make us do what she wants, even if it isn’t what we want. Wouldn’t you rather not have to eat, breathe, or sleep? Is striving for things you don’t need just so you can impress your neighbors really what you want from life? Yet nature forces us to do these things by tying our happiness to them, since eating and impressing the neighbors (which leads to mating) furthers the survival of the species. If you could be happy when you wanted to, on your own conditions, you would tell the survival of the species to go hang, and arrange it so you never had to do anything difficult or unpleasant to be happy.
Yet still, I think happiness is the bedrock value to strive for. It’s the thing that we should use to analyze everything we think and do–the basic goal of all thought and action. Why, when it is clearly a carrot on a stick? Well, carrot on a stick it may be, but it’s still tasty when we get a nibble of it. To be less whimsical, what I am saying is that although there is no transcendental, higher reason to be happy, no grand purpose or congruence with the laws of material reality, it just makes good common sense. It’s a bedrock goal that seems self-explanatory. Why shouldn’t we want to be happy? Given the meaninglessness of transcendental goals like “being a good person” or “being all you can be,” what else do we have to turn to when figuring out how we should best live our lives, and on what basis we should think and act?
This means, of course, that we have to dance nature’s dance. But not entirely. Our biology determines a lot of our thought, but so does our culture (as culture is able to make biological shifts in the brain). And part of our culture is the ability to resist the basic dictates of nature (to our own detriment as a species, perhaps). The words I am typing right now are a perfect example. Awareness of happiness as nature’s carrot may help to shift brain structure in such a way that we find other ways to be happy (that is, shift our brain structure so that some sense-events make us happy even though they do not align perfectly with nature’s needs.) Culture has been doing this forever, nudging what makes us happy and unhappy away from what nature strictly requires.
(Of course, “you cannot go against nature/because if you do/going against nature/is part of nature too.” – L&R, “No New Tale to Tell.”)
Ultimately, we should strive to shift our brain structure in such a way that we are happy all the time. Of course, this is not possible. So we will always have to do things we are conditioned to do, or biologically wired to do, to attain our goals. But this does not preclude shifting our brain structure some, so that happiness comes easier, we don’t need to suffer as much unhappiness to get to happiness, etc. For some of us this may be very difficult indeed! 😦
Black Hole Radiation 