Course Schedule Pieces

Pieces

Some concluding ideas about Happiness and Wisdom

• 1. Happiness “evolves,” but evolution isn’t about happiness.

• 2. The bite of reality is lessen by understanding necessity and by our own psychological “tool kits.”

• 3. The future is a problem.

• 4. We often miss opportunities for happiness, but then, it’s a moving target.

• 5. Wisdom is a real capacity that we can cultivate through both cognitive and affective skills.

Gilbert, Chapter 4: In the Blind Spot of the Mind's Eye

• Gilbert, C4, “In the Blind Spot of the Mind’s Eye” (21)

• Comparisons of Adolph Fisher & George Eastman. Point: Need to 2nd guess how we impose seemingly objective criteria on others' lives.

• Just because it's easier for us to imagine that a certain kind of future will bring happiness, and what we imagine might even be in line with objective research, it doesn't follow that other futures won't.

• Brain reweaves experience: study with cars and stop signs/yield signs. Information acquired after the event alters memory of the event.
• Two highly confirmed results: Memory fills in. We don't typically notice it happening. Word list excercise. 80 -- literal and metaphorical blindspots. experiments with interrupted sentences. We fill in.

• Model of Mind (84) Prior to 19th century:

"Philosophers had thought of the senses as conduits that allowed information about the properties of objects in the world to travel from the object and into the mind. The mind was like a movie screen in which the object was rebroadcast. The operation broke down on occasion, hence people occasionally saw things as they were not. But when the senses were working properly, they showed what was there. This theory of realism was described in 1690 by the philosopher John Locke: brains "believe" they don't "make believe" .

• Model of Mind brought in with Kant at beginning of 1800's:

Kant's idealism: "Kant's new theory of idealism claimed that our perceptions are not the result of a physiological process by which our eyes somehow transmit an image of the world into our brains but rather, they are the result of a psychological process that combines what our eyes see with what we already think, feel, know, want, and believe, and then uses this combination of sensory information and preexisting knowledge to construct our perception of reality. "

• false belief test -- [1] [As we develop, we acquire "theory of mind" and the capacity to enter the subjective space of others. Interestingly, it's hard to enter our own (strangers to ourselves) and our future selves.

• Still, we act like realists: truck moving study-- we are first realists, but we learn to adopt an idealist perspective in social communication.
• We experience the world as if our interpretations were part of reality. We do not realize we are seeing an interpretation.
• We fill in details: imagine a plate of spaghetti. Very important for thinking about how we fill in the future. We carry out the exercise of imagining, and even make estimates of satisfaction, but the result depends upon which of the family of experiences picked out by "plate of spaghetti" we have in mind.
• point for happiness theories: p. 89.
• closes by giving you the narratives that make sense of the Fisher/Eastman comparison.

Space, Time and Future Preferences

• Hedonic adaptation (also, hedonic treadmill) -- the declining marginal utility of addition units of consumption, all other factors being equal --

• We spatialize time because it's an abstract thing and thinking of its spatially helps make it concrete. But Gilbert thinks this leads to mistakes in "affect forecasting" - predicting how you will feel about a hedonic in the future.

• False prediction of future pleasure -- p. 130 study on snack predictions. (no variety condition happier)

• Gilbert's hedonic adaptation thought experiment -- Imagine you are preordering from a restaurant for the next few weeks.

• favoring assumption (how much you like each dish)
• habituation rate assumption (how quickly pleasure declines or habituates)
• consumption rate. (the time scale of the consumption)
• See diagrams

• Gilbert's partial point -- variety has a cost… [But it doesn't follow that it's not in your happiness-interest to pay it sometimes.]
• Slogan for the day: "Pleasure isn't linear."

My Philosophy of Happiness and Wisdom Paper

• In this 8-10 page paper you are invited to construct an integrated philosophy of wisdom and happiness. You should start by identifying topics and themes in the course that spoke to you. You should also bring in personal frames of reference, such as faith commitments, that may inform your thinking even if they were not treated in the course. The ultimate goal is for you to integrate your views on happiness and wisdom by thinking also about how they are related, but you may organize your paper into two main sections, one each on happiness and wisdom, and then try to bring them together in your conclusion.

• Due date: December 15th, 2021.