What is happiness?

 As a follow-up to our discussion on humor I thought we might try and discuss happiness.  I've dipped into this pool of thought before with mixed results, but every time is different, isn't it?

Rather than spending a lot of time writing about happiness, research on happiness, types and degrees of happy, and so forth, I recommend that you go onto YouTube and search on happiness and watch a few of the presentations there.  People study human happiness in a variety of ways.  Subjects take tests and surveys, researchers think up tricky tests that challenge a common sense sort of happiness ideal, and the results are not necessarily what you would expect.  

As with beauty being in the eye of the beholder, happiness seems to have a similar sort of personally identified kind of relationship we each create for ourselves.  There is an axiom that we all create our own happiness, and some of the research presented in the talks seems to bear this out.

If you decide to log in and participate on Friday, March 26, that would make me happy.

Addenda:

I looked up Happiness on Ted Talks (not the plus one, by the way), and found a pod cast that included a talk given by Barry Schwartz where he talks about the relationship between having lots of choices in life and happiness.  He concludes that having a little bit of choice increases happiness, but having a lot of choices decreases it.  He uses the salad dressing shelves at the grocery store as an example.  He reports that there are 175 different salad dressings there, and the process of selecting just one to take home with you can cause paralysis.   Selecting just one leads to regret that the one you bought was not actually the one you wanted.  You end up disappointed rather than happier, due to the many choices.  To listen takes 12 minutes, and it is worth your time.

Here is another link.  I posted on the topic of Happiness Sauce in October, 2012.  Click on this link to find a coherent and helpful discussion, at least in my opinion.

What is time?

Note that the date is changed!  The meeting on Feb. 26 was cancelled due to my reaction to the second shot of Covid virus vaccine.  I'm better now, so we can pick this topic up again.  March 12!  7:00.   

It has been a little while since we have tackled a classically philosophic topic.  While "What is Time?" is not exactly a "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" quality topic, it can be a little esoteric and hard to "get into" for many people.  Hopefully my introduction here will help.

 "What is time?  If nobody asks me, I know; but if I desired to explain it to anyone who should ask me, then plainly I know not."  St. Augustine

 Time is usually broken down into 3 general categories: things in the past, things in the future, and the miniscule moment that separates them.  We like to think that this beautiful, fleeting moment we live in as being a moving, flowing snippet of time with essentially zero duration since the past follows so quickly after it, and the future is yet to be.  A razor's edge, is how I like to describe it. 

 Science measures the passage of very small durations of time by using the vibration of molecules, and large amounts of time by using the speed of light as a reference.  The human mind can perceive time only in what I would call practical terms, limited by the speed we take in perceptional information and processes it in our minds.  In that context the speed of thought might actually be very slow. 

 One metric I have always liked is that our minds can stitch together images into a flowing, coherent pattern if the images change at a rate of 22 frames per second or higher.  In the old days of movie film, if the film projection slowed to below 22 FPS, the images would appear to the audience to be jumpy and disconnected on the screen.  Typically films would be made at 30 FPS, avoiding this problem.  If that 22 FPS rate is true, then maybe the speed of thought is 1/22nd of a second?  Cognitive science measures the speed of neuron synapse info transfer at a much higher rate, so let's table this for now and maybe come back at it from another angle in a separate BQ.

 We normally see causal events in a common sense sort of way, where something happens and events follow due to this initial event.  A stone thrown into a pond creates ripples on the surface.  We understand this process because we are looking backwards, into the past, and we infer the movement of time from the motions we see. 

 But what if time is not moving, and we only infer the motion because of this perceptional frame of reference.  What if we take out the idea that the "present moment" is special in any way, but rather is just one of an infinite number of frames of reference we can perceive at any one time.  If we take motion out of the process, can we create a description of time that does not move?  Philosophers with way too much time on their hands have done this by suggesting that space-time might be composes of individual frames, each of infinitesimally small in duration, but connected much like the 2-dimensional frames on a movie strip.  These frames, they say, are actually 4-dimensional blocks.  They are composed of the 3-dimensional universe plus a 4th dimension of time.

 Ok, admittedly this is getting a little strange to think about.  If these block frames exist, and they include the past and the future, does that mean the universe is already set?  It leads us back towards issues of Free Will and predestination.  As always, things seem to be interconnected.

 My suggestion is to give this topic a good start, and let's see where it goes.  Are there movies you've seen that play with time as a plot theme?  Interstellar comes to mind for me, but time in that movie is handled by Einstein's special relativity, for the most part.  Time travelling stories often deal with time manipulation.  What comes to your mind?  How about The Lake House starring Sandra Bullock and Kenau Reeves.

What is your life's story?

 I had a dream last night that I moved to a new house in the Midwest.  In my dream I met a new neighbor, and to explain to him who I was I recounted an abbreviated resume of where I have lived, what I have done, what schools I attended, where I have traveled, my family and their accomplishments, and so forth.  This list of items then, in effect, provided a sort of definition of who I am. 

This rang a bell for me when I considered a past BQ topic, what gives our lives meaning?  I recall a meeting maybe 20 years ago when a group of us discussed a list of possible answers to that question that I passed out earlier in the evening that included things like, Life is a journey; Life is the pursuit of pleasure; Life is pain; Life is meaningless; Life’s meaning is to fulfill God’s plan, and many more.   The act of sitting down and considering the ways we react to each of the possibilities in the list provided a kind of feedback that we might not otherwise see.  

Do I think life is a journey?  Yes, a journey we take step by step, every day.

Is life the pursuit of pleasure?  Yes, but more than just pleasure, and pleasure in moderation.

Is life pain?  At times, but it gets better.  And there are many kinds of pain and not all are bad.

The idea that each of us could be somehow defined by the lives we have lived and the actions we have taken through our lives makes sense when we look backwards and examine the decisions we made and consequences of those decisions.  Our “cause and effect” brains can see the billiard balls bumping into each other, each contact affecting both in some way.  We may have made a decision to take a new job, for instance, and that decision had lots of consequences.  Making that decision was important in many ways and affected many people who were not so obviously going to be affected.  You can see it looking back, but you didn’t see it when you anticipated possible outcomes. 

I was recently asked to think of a decision or action I took that had a large impact on my life, and to share that action with a small group.  In the context I am trying to create in this narrative, this life altering decision or action might be seen as defining, in an important way, who I am today.  My life’s story, and the stories of all those around me, has been affected by that one decision I took, and stopping to think about it can be cathartic. 

What is your life’s story, and does it define you?

Nature vs Nurture: A Philosophical Perspective?

During the last session it was suggested we talk about (human) development in terms of the contributions that come from genetics (nature) and from the environment (nurture).  I added the term human in this statement, as I don't recall that the topic was limited only to people as first suggested.

My first reaction was that this was less a philosophical topic and more one for psychology or some other field.  Behavior, learning, language, etc. fall into the field of psychology, which gladly accepts it.  Here is a link that lays out the nature vs nurture argument in psychologically clear terms, and identifies the key players in their origin and development.   John Locke's use of the term tabula rasa in 1690 to describe human mental development at birth as a "blank slate" upon which our environment (through learning) will provide the information to write upon it really set the argument rolling for this dichotomy of ideas.

Genetically, the viable product of an egg and a sperm will be an offspring that is related to the parents constrained only by the DNA/RNA/enzyme and protein manufacturing capabilities of the resultant cells.  When I taught Intro. to Biology we dedicated a week to the basics of genetics, including genes and how they determine growth and development of an organism.  We did a fruit fly experiment where we crossed red and green eyed flies, who also had a gene for either smooth or crinkly wings.  We then counted how many flies had the various characters and determined dominant and recessive traits.  Studies of the presence or absence of features like this make a strong case for a fundamental genetic basis to physical characteristics, which I think we can all agree upon.  

Looking for references that shed some additional light on this phenomenon, I ran across this Ted Talks Blog where the relationship between our neural network and its reaction to our environment is explored.  The author says that our genome reacts to the environment we put ourselves in, acknowledging the interaction between environment and our DNA, and suggests that the right sorts of stimuli we may encounter might enhance our cognitive abilities.  Our brains are continually making new neurons, he says, and our environment can influence how they grow and develop.  Hanging out with smart people will make you smarter?  Makes sense to me.

So rather than a dichotomy of influencers, nature and nurture both play a role in human development (of course), and this is an on-going and dynamic process we can influence as individuals.  

Here are a couple of things you might want to look up before our next meeting.

1.    Studies of the separation of twin babies separated at birth, who subsequently grow up in very different environments.  What case studies can you find?  How does the influence of genetics (nature) play out in the individuals?  Can we draw conclusions about the influence of the environments (nurture) on their ultimate development?

2.    There was a time when this was a very hot topic.  People in he past have been obsessed with the idea that language was learned by babies because of their environment, but if this stimulus could be taken away, the infant would innately use what was called a natural or Adamic language.  Accounts of this being tried find their was into the literature: babies may have been actually used in these experiments where all language was withheld from them just to see how they would develop.  Here is a link to the Wiki summary of 4 such studies. 

What is your Essence?

 For those of you who pay attention to new movies that have been released in the past year, a Disney/Pixar release called Soul has been getting some recent attention (available only by streaming on Disney + channel).  The reviews have been good, so Judy and I watched it last night.  It raises many, many philosophical and theological questions, many of which shoot past in dialogue or situation very quickly, but the story is charming and the graphics are amazing.  

For example, one of the characters is 2-dimensional.  When was the last time you saw an actual 2-dimensional character in a movie?  (Hint: comic characters in the newspaper are only lines on paper, hence 2-dimensioinal.  The movie characters in Soul have been reduced to the absolute graphic minimum, and they are fantastic.)   I’ve teased out one of the major threads presented in the movie, “What is your essence?”, and I think we can make a pretty good BQ out of it.  If you have a chance to watch the movie before we have our meeting it would be best, but isn’t totally necessary.

In the movie, newly formed proto-soul’s have a short series of attributes they need to obtain before they are fully formed and ready to fall to Earth to start to inhabit a body.  One of these attributes is an essence.  They are allowed to find whatever their essence is through a process of participating or observing anything that happens or can be done on Earth (a pretty fun scene), and once identified, their soul is complete and off they go. 

The hero of the movie is Joe, a former living human with a fully formed soul, but things have conspired to place his adult soul among the newly formed little souls who are gathering attributes.  Joe knows exactly what his passion is as a human has madly pursued it, and only learns of his essence later, upon reflection.  He learns that the conflicts and disappointments in his life that he has been fighting all along are because his passion blinded him to the greater good he was actually doing with his essence.

This passion vs essence conflict jumps off the screen to me as it is a manifestation of Fredrick Nietzsche’s famous quote, “Become who you are!”  This sentiment ran its course philosophically in the 1800’s and 1900’s and influenced notable thinkers like Carl Jung and Albert Camus, among many others.  Read about it here.

This topic has been done before, in the Being vs Becoming topic we did last Sept 3.  Seeing it presented so well in this movie drags it up again for me.  I hope you get a chance to see it before we meet.

What is humor?

 I attended a serious philosophical lecture on this topic at the Univ. of Washington several years ago hoping the lecturer would salt his presentation with witticisms that would make me laugh.  Sadly, it was very dry and mostly boring.  If you want a philosophical analysis along the lines of that lecture, check this link out.  Maybe that was what was desired when the participant from the last session suggested the topic, or maybe they wanted someone to tell a lot of jokes first so we could all enjoy them?  Please come with your favorite joke book in hand, ready to share.  Holiday or COVID jokes might be the order of the day.

The click-thru link above leads to an article that discusses the difference between laughter and humor, which I liked.  Children telling knock-knock jokes and then laughing understand that the joke was funny enough to get people to laugh at least once.  That repetition diminishes the likelihood that people will laugh again is not as easily understood.  One writer distinguishes laughter and humor this way. "laughter results from a pleasant psychological shift, whereas, humor arises from a pleasant cognitive shift."  This sort of mind-body duality appeals to the Descartes-ian in me.  "I laugh, therefore I am!"

Here are books that use jokes and humor to teach the ideas of philosophy.

    Plato and a Platypus walk into a bar...; Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes, by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, 2007.  This book follows the standard Big Questions of Philosophy pattern of identifying the BQ, and then laying them out through the use of jokes and funny stories.  There are 2 characters in the book so they can approximate a dialectic discussion of the topics, which helps to make it interesting.  If find just reading through the jokes to be a lot of fun, honestly.  I keep this book on the headboard of the bed for nighttime reading.

    Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates; Using Philosophy (and jokes) to Explore Life, Death, the Afterlife, and Everything In Between.  Cathcart and Klein, 2009.  This book uses the same format as the one above, but includes far more 1-panel comics as well.  The comics are often in a Far Side sort of style, although I don't think there are any from that source.  It is less a survey of BQ topics and more of an exploration of topics around death, the afterlife, immortality, Heaven, and so forth.  In one cartoon an old man is lying in bed, his wife is holding his hand, and the caption are his likely last words, "I should have bought more crap!"    My addition:  said nobody, ever.

Adding to the list of sites to visit for additional info about the philosophy of humor are these:

BigThink.com:  This sponsored site has a fairly good summary of the topic, and includes a video of a famous comic talking about how humor and laughter work, from his perspective.

PhilosophyNow.org:  A short article that has some excellent examples of verbal humor, and links to related articles worth visiting.

PsychologyToday.com:   There is a section here talking about the humor around the Corona Virus pandemic, if you can believe it, and some of the jokes are pretty funny.  Also links to podcasts that relate to Philosophy of Humor, if you like podcasts.

There seems to be no end to on-line info on this topic.  I hope people take the time to look at some of it, at least, to become grounded in the philosophic side of the topic.  And to bring their favorite jokes to share.

What is cultural relativism, and can we judge others?

Note:  this topic will be discussed on Nov. 13.

On October 11th the Seattle Times published 2 articles by Ron Judd concerned with the subject of George Washington.  The questions raised were essentially, why was our state named for someone who owned slaves and never set foot here, and how can we venerate founding fathers who promoted the ideals of universal freedom for all and still owned slaves?  Click here and here to read the articles.

The philosophical question behind these questions is, do we have a right to judge others in different cultures or from different times using the standards we have today?  Is it right to think that our values and norms are somehow universally correct for everyone, everywhere, and everywhen?   Or, do we need to step back and say, they lived in a different time and by different norms we can't really judge?  The subtext is, are there universal norms that always apply, like murder is always wrong, and slavery is always wrong, no matter what?

I liked the even-handedness Judd uses in his articles, and how he included interviews with black historians who study Washington and others of the founding fathers, and shares their perspectives.  I can feel the relativistic process at work, tying in the recent Civil War statue removal backlashes, among other current issues.  At one level you can see a revisionist history being written while, at the same time, we are asking ourselves if it is right to change the way we interpret and report on past events.  Can't we accept that things were different then, and accept the people of that time (in this case), and somehow understand their perspectives and motivations?

The practice at the time of the young USA was for a slaveholder to free his slaves upon his death through his will, which Washington did.  Jefferson did the same (for the most part).  Judd's historians raise the question, how different would the fledgling USA have turned out if he had freed his slaves while serving as president?  He missed his chance to be that shining example that maybe he should have been.