Pragmatism: its Conception of Verified Truth #1

Essay by an anonymous contributor* reposted from Pi Alpha

In this, the first of two posts, Pi presents reflections on ‘Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth’, a title which William James chose in 1907 for a classic paper on pragmatism.

One of the most basic questions a philosopher can ask is: ‘What is truth?’ What does it mean for a thing to be ‘true’?

Truth, as a dictionary would tell you, is a property of our ideas. Their agreement (between our ideas and reality) is truth, where their disagreement is falsity. This tells us what the word ‘truth’ means in conversation, but a dictionary cannot tell us what is meant by the term ‘reality’ or the agreement of our ideas with this reality. A true idea, in the non-pragmatic sense, is an idea that accurately reflects reality. People would never believe something that they know to be false, so everyone’s beliefs are about something that they think is true. This does not really get at the heart of the problem, though, which demands what reality?

The great American philosopher (I think, the first great American philosopher) was William James. His development of the school known as pragmatism created for me America’s first original school of thought, and thus America’s first real contribution to the world of philosophy. Indeed, when James headed the Colombia philosophy department, the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, whose interests spanned the logical structure of language, said it was one of the finest schools in the world. James did not like the Cartesian idea that truth is the correct reflection of reality, but instead insisted that truth is made by us through interactions with reality, although not one stagnant reality.

Previously in Europe, the pervasive school of thought was that if your idea could be said to be true, then ‘you are where you ought to be mentally’. However, pragmatism asserts that you should take a belief to be true, then ask:

‘What concrete differences will its (an idea’s) being true make in anyone’s actual life?’ 

This question becomes the foundation of pragmatism: what experiences with reality would be different if the belief were to be true or false? James then goes on to make his largest claim, that truth ideas are those that:

‘we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify’

This is the practical difference that true or false ideas have to us. Indeed, this process of assimilation, validation, corroboration, and verification allow us in effect to make an idea true or false. ‘Truth happens to an idea.’ This thought is in direct response to the European schools of thought that had a stagnant reality which true ideas correspond to and false ideas do not. In effect, James is claiming that ideas become true or are made true by actual events.

The possession of a true idea is not an end in of itself, but can be seen as a tool that allows us to function towards our desires and goals. James brings up an example that I shall use for the rest of this and the next post: imagine that you are lost in the woods and starved, but you come to what appears to be a track leading in some unknown direction. If you know that it is a cow track, and that cow tracks lead to farmers’ houses, then this information is useful to you. ‘The true thought (the one that the track is in fact a cow track) is useful here because the house (at the end of the track) which is its object is useful.’ In this scenario, the track is useful because of the situation you are in, which is being in need of food. But if the situation were slightly different, the usefulness of this truth is changed as well.

Let us say that the track that we come to appears to us to be made by a goat and not by a cow , along with the knowledge that cow tracks lead to farmers’ houses and goat tracks lead to large fields. This then changes the usefulness of the path, but does not change the fact that the information that we already knew is useful to us. Back to the cow tracks scenario, let us say that it is a cow path, not a goat one. The information that goat paths lead nowhere useful is in itself useful, although not right now. James calls these extra truths.

At this point I feel I need to stop and re-clarify the example. The reason we know that goat tracks lead nowhere is because before, in a different woods, we followed a goat track and it led us nowhere, whereas previously the cow tracks did lead to a safe house. This process is the verification process, that tells us what ideas we have are true and which ones are not. However, if say we had forgotten this previous adventure, and followed the goat tracks and they led to a house, then the truth that goat tracks do not lead to houses would be false.

‘Whenever such an extra truth becomes practically relevant to one of our emergencies, it passes from cold storage to do work in the world and our belief in it grows active.’ 

 This idea of goat tracks leading nowhere, but cow tracks leading to houses, can be said to be true because it is useful, but also can be useful because it is true. Both these things say the same thing, that ‘here is an idea that gets fulfilled and can be verified. ‘True’ is the name for whatever idea starts the verification process, ‘useful’ the name for its completed function in experience.’ True ideas obtain a certain value based on their usefulness to us in situations. Pragmatism’s general notion of truth is about the way one moment in our experience with reality may lead us towards similar desired moments. We as humans, with a finite unknown amount of time here, want moments that are worthwhile having. True ideas are those that get us to our destination of worthwhile moments.

Experience is filled with regularities. One moment can (and often does) influence the next moment we have. ‘Truth, in these cases, means nothing but eventual verification.’ This verification takes place when we interact with reality from one moment to the next moment (or what I call, existence through persisting reality) and our ideas are being used to influence this persisting reality.

Back to our scenario of the cow tracks: verification takes place when we follow the tracks and actually see the house and get food and rest inside. Or the goat tracks one: the verification process takes place when we get to the end of it, and there is no house to take shelter in or give us food. Verification can be positive or negative. If the cow tracks lead to a house, it is verified positively. If it leads nowhere, it is verified negatively. On the other hand, if the goat tracks actually lead to a house, then it can be said that our previous belief was false, or that its verification was negative. We have verified that our previously held belief was false.

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* This post is adapted from Pi Alpha, the first embodiment of Pi.  In the transition to Pi Beta, the name of the author was unfortunately lost.  His identity would be a welcome addition - if anyone can help.

The Octave Illusion

Posted by Thomas Scarborough*

–

440Hz and 880Hz alternating R and L

The Octave Illusion was discovered by Diana Deutsch in 1973. It produced two alternating tones, one octave apart, in each ear. However, when the tone in one ear went ‘high’, the tone in the other ear went ‘low’, and vice versa. (Click the arrow to play.)

The tones used here are A4 (440 Hz) and A5 (880 Hz) - in this case reproduced with the precision of the modern computer. The effect is the same whether this is played through headphones or loudspeakers -- and interestingly, does not change when the headphones or loudspeakers are swapped around.

It is a simple auditory illusion, yet most powerful. Instead of hearing two alternating tones in each ear - as one should - most people hear alternating tones bouncing from ear to ear. It seems that the brain has therefore removed two tones, one from each ear. That is, the tones are replaced with silences.

There is copious literature on what this might mean, and what might cause the effect - yet the general agreement is that there is no simple explanation.

It might not seem at first that an auditory illusion has anything to do with philosophy. However, what we have in this particular case is auditory ‘objects’ -- a range of auditory ‘things’ which include bangs, ringtones, meows, and so on -- which belong to the much larger set of ‘objects’ in general.

To this day, then, we search for ways to decide what is or is not illusory ...

space, time, numbers

identity, free will

things, events, properties

society, language

money

matter, force, energy

causes, physical laws...

... and even God.

Thus, illusions such as that above -- of which we all now are aware -- have a lot to do with the way we perceive our world.  It has not always been so. There once was a time - or so it is thought - where we perceived everything as real. Today, to borrow the words of the British philosophy professor Simon Blackburn, we have left this far behind: ‘Everything you can think of has at some time or another been declared to be a fiction by philosophers.’

It falls under the subject of ontology - and it all started, according to the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher, Thomas Reid, when we separated objects from ideas. The Octave Illusion is just one of many evidences that our experience is not the same as the ideas we have about it. Our brains have already interpreted it for us.

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* The author once designed a simple electronic unit to produce this effect. This is still obtainable from the publisher at https://www.elektormagazine.com/magazine/elektor-200411/17842

Is Beyoncé really an Existentialist?

Glamorous, yes. But is this what an Existentialist couple looks like?

Posted by Martin Cohen

There are many who claim to be existentialists, but few of them seem to be following the same path. Perhaps that is because existentialism is supposed to be all about individualism. Here is one such recruit to the philosophy - Beyoncé - of whom we are assured ‘writing existential songs that move millions is kind of her thing’. Her performance of her song ‘I Was Here’ at the United Nations World Humanitarian Day in 2012 was epic.

‘The song is so powerful, so true. It is existentialism in it’s purest form: I was here. “I want to leave my footprints on the sand of time/ Know there was something that, something that I left behind/ When I leave this world, I’ll leave no regrets/Leave something to remember, so they won’t forget.”’

So writes Kari. Who is: a ‘vegan, breastfeeding, baby-wearing, yogi-mama that also loves to binge watch Netflix whilst eating an entire bag of potato chips’. So she ought to know!

But is it really existentialism as philosophers see it? Indeed the word has often been misused, but hen it is a term poorly defined even by the great existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre. Instead, we are left to guess at its , ahem, ‘essence’.

‘I was here, I lived, I loved, I was here. I did, I’ve done, everything that I wanted.’

Beyoncé Knowles is in many ways a remarkable figure. Born on September 4, 1981, in Houston, Texas, to parents one of whom worked as a hairstylist and the other was.. a manager in the record industry. The advice and skills of the two were both doubtless of later use. She somehow managed to become one of music’s top-selling artists with a net worth of around $300 million, only slightly shadowed by the assets of her partner, the rapper, Jay Z, who wears his cap back-to-front and T-shirts with slogans like ‘Blame Society’ and is is sitting on a pile of $500 million. Is there not something inauthentic, even contradictory about that? Maybe, but then… ‘Blame society’.

As a young girl, Beyoncé won a school singing competition with John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. But it’s not what Lennon probably imagined as the good life, even if it is highly idiosyncratic. To be fair, she does do some ‘good works’, with charities including Chime for Change, Girl Up, Elevate Network, International Planned Parenthood Federation, Girls Inc. of Greater Houston, and I Was Here cited in her publicity. Beyoncé also joined former Destiny’s Child bandmate, Kelly Rowland, to create the Survivor Foundation, which provides relief to victims of natural disasters. This is all very fine  - but it is not the stuff of existentialism, which is at heart a selfish doctrine born of elitism.

But back to the main question: is Beyoncé really an existentialist? And I don't think so… After all, whatever else he may or may not have been saying, Sartre openly derides those who act out roles: the bourgeoisie with their comfortable sense of ‘duty’, homosexuals who pretend to be heterosexuals, peeping Toms who get caught in the act of spying and - most famously of all - waiters who rush about. All of these, he says are slaves to other people's perceptions - to ‘the Other’. They are exhibiting mauvaise foi - bad faith.

This is a common flaw, and as the psychologists say, in choosing this fault to condemn in others, Sartre tells us a little about himself too. But isn’t it a popstar who dresses a certain way, adopts a certain hairstyle, away of speaking, of walking, that Sartre should really mock for their pretending and posturing to the audiecne and promising to be something that they are not really…?

Surely Beyoncé should find another label than that of ‘existentialist’ to attach to herself.

Altruism: Is It Real?

Painting by Jacques-Louis David (1781) depicting ‘Belisarius Begging for Alms’

Posted by Keith Tidman

A car is turned over, set ablaze. A passerby spots the driver still trapped inside. The driver has little time left, soon to be engulfed by the flames. The passerby sprints, from amidst onlookers, to the fiery wreck, managing to pull the driver out to safety but at his own grave peril. The ‘good Samaritan’ waits for the first responders to arrive, while comforting the semiconscious driver, and then leaves without giving his name or waiting for a thank-you.

Were the actions of the passerby those of altruism? Most people would immediately answer that question affirmatively. After all, the passerby selflessly put himself at risk, to aid a stranger. He seemed to disregard his own welfare. There was no expectation of reward or adulation or reciprocity. And he could just as readily have stood impassively watching or gone on his way to office or home, as everyone else was doing. Still, might the passerby’s self-interested motivation and intent have been as simple and basic as feeling good about having performed the deed? Or might the passerby’s actions have been prompted irresistibly by instinct, based on his brain’s physiology? Or is yet another explanation plausible?

Some people deny that altruism exists at all. Altruism is impossible, they say. They contend that all actions are taken solely to satisfy some selfish need or urge, and that the fact such actions might benefit someone else is incidental — or at least self-serving. The philosopher Ayn Rand starkly warned against what she saw, in fact, as the purported deceit of altruism: ‘If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that people have to reject’.

One name for such beliefs is ‘psychological egoism’: the view that deep down, people are always motivated by what they perceive to be in their own self-interest. That is, voluntarily helping others is only a subsidiary consequence of actions taken, where assistance rendered is impelled singularly by wanting to benefit ourselves. We relish feeling the glow of doing good. This overriding self-interest remains valid even when the actions taken might be accompanied by detriment to the doer, divorced from the urge to ‘help’. In short, no acts, it is thought, are designed solely to benefit someone else. There’s always the sense of gratification for having helped. It’s an unflattering explanation of human nature and behaviour.

Against this, other people subscribe to so-called ‘pure’ or ‘strong’ altruism’. This is a model of behaviour where acts of altruism are wholly selfless, undertaken uniquely to benefit someone else. There is no expectation of either an intrinsic or extrinsic reward, or of personal gratification. That is, every ‘good deed’ — including those where there’s a noble sacrifice (possibly even injury or death to the doer) — is unswervingly motivated by the desire to be of service to others. Martin Luther King’s words capture these sentiments, when he talks of the choice between ‘walking in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness’. A recent real-life example of self-sacrificial altruism was of a university professor who, losing his life in the process, blocked the door to his classroom in order to shield his students from the bullets of a rampaging shooter.

However, one characterisation of selflessness centers on utilitarian ideas about individuals deferring dispassionately to bettering the welfare of others, in the process, resisting their own self-interested wants and urgings. The definition of ‘others’ in this case may range from a single individual to family members, friends, associates, or larger community (the collective), importantly including people we don’t know and never will. It’s a more logic-based approach to supporting others’ wellbeing. Another approach centers on sympathy and kindheartedness, correlated to an intense response to the suffering and misfortune of others. Although there may always be the prospect of self-gain, here aiding others is based more in sentiment than reason, and hinges on the specialness of human connections. The 18th-century English philosopher Joseph Butler nicely parses this point about the balance between self-gain and selflessness, observing that: 

‘The satisfaction that accompanies good acts is itself not the motivation of the act; satisfaction is not the motive, but only the consequence.’

Thus far I have focused on ‘psychological altruism’, involving prosocial, empathic, compassionate behaviours such as providing aid and comfort in order to alleviate another person’s or a group’s suffering. Especially a total stranger’s woe, rather than the presumably simpler case of a relative’s or friend’s anguish. Taking in a migrant family, with no expected reward, is one example of this type of aid; volunteering as a doctor or nurse to work, say, in a remotely located Ebola or HIV treatment facility might be another. However, there may be at least another explanation for fathoming the human facility for altruistic deeds: the physiology of an individual’s brain.

Recent research, using brain imaging, claims to have found that those people with little to no empathy, compassion, or ability to recognize cues of others’ distress tend to have smaller-than-average amygdala regions. The worst-case example being psychopathy, resulting in those with this condition to act callously, insensitively, and disinterested in others’ welfare. People thus afflicted thereby are often unable to recognize others’ fear. In contrast, highly altruistic people tend to have amygdalas that are larger and more reactive than average. This kind of explanation in which ‘mind’ is reduced to ‘matter’ does, of course, bring into question whether free agency is essential to altruism. In the case of our hypothetical passerby, the one who rescues the driver from the burning car, it’s assumed that his amygdala would have had these same features. In this same vein, the affection people generally feel for their own children, along with a deep motivation to protect and do good for them, may seem to be ‘hard-wired’, further pointing to the role of brain physiology in altruism. This extends beyond just gene survival and evolutionary purposes.

Sigmund Freud pointed out that our motives, and the motives of others, are often veiled, and that we are in fact driven by parts of our minds that have agenda of which we are unaware. Perhaps, therefore, the difference between ‘pure altruism’ (if attainable) and what we might call ‘everyday altruism’ is more one of language and semantics, with little to no practical consequence as to the reality of altruism and beneficial outcomes.

Dive

By Jeremy Dyer *


You draw a breath as you dive under the wave
Of silence in this nether world
Where peace and pain and green light and bubbles flow
As your body curves slowly to the surface
     like it was the first time
Waking from a dream that wants to drown you
     in its comforting
Pinpricks of light as you pause between the forces
Of darkness and light, hope and despair, death and life
Like an abandoned photograph slowly fading
Wishing everything would dissolve forever
and you would cease to be
alone

* Jeremy Dyer is an acclaimed Cape Town artist.

The world in crisis: it’s not what we think

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

The real danger is an explosion - of Big Data

We lived once with the dream of a better world: more comfortable, more secure, and more advanced.  Political commentator Dinesh D’Souza called it ‘the notion that things are getting better, and will continue to get better in the future’.  We call it progress.  Yet while our world has in many ways advanced and improved, we seem unsure today whether the payoff matches the investment.  In fact, we all feel sure that something has gone peculiarly wrong—but what?  Why has the climate turned on us?  Why is the world still unsafe?  Why do we still suffer vast injustices and inequalities?  Why do we still struggle, if not materially, then with our sense of well-being and quality of life?  Is there anything in our travails which is common to all, and lies at the root of them all?

It will be helpful to consider what it is that has brought us progress—which in itself may lead us to the problem.  There have been various proposals:  that progress is of the inexorable kind; that it is illusory and rooted in the hubristic belief that earlier civilisations were always backward; or it is seen as a result of our escape from blind authority and appeal to tradition.  Yet above all, progress is associated with the liberating power of knowledge, which now expands at an exhilarating pace on all fronts.  ‘The idea of progress,’ wrote the philosopher Charles Frankel, ‘is peculiarly a response to ... organized scientific inquiry’.

Further, science, within our own generation, has quietly entered a major new phase, which began around the start of the 21st Century.  We now have big data, which is extremely large data sets which may be analysed computationally.

Now when we graph the explosion of big data, we interestingly find that this (roughly) coincides on two axes with various global trends—among them increased greenhouse gas emissions, sea level rise, economic growth, resource use, air travel—even increased substance abuse, and increased terrorism.  There is something, too, which seems more felt than it is demonstrable.  A great many people sense that modern society burdens us—more so than it did in former times.

Why should an explosion of big data roughly coincide—even correlate—with an explosion of global travails?

On the one hand, big data has proved beyond doubt that it has many benefits.  Through the analysis of extremely large data sets, we have found new correlations to spot business trends, prevent diseases, and combat crime—among other things.  At the same time, big data presents us with a raft of problems: privacy concerns, interoperability challenges, the problem of imperfect algorithms, and the law of diminishing returns.  A major difficulty lies in the interpretation of big data.  Researchers Danah Boyd and Kate Crawford observe, ‘Working with Big Data is still subjective, and what it quantifies does not necessarily have a closer claim on objective truth.’  Not least, big data depends on social sorting and segmentation—mostly invisible—which may have various unfair effects.

Yet apart from the familiar problems, we find a bigger one.  The goal of big data, to put it very simply, is to make things fit.  Production must fit consumption; foodstuffs must fit our dietary requirements and tastes; goods and services must fit our wants and inclinations; and so on.  As the demands for a better fit increase, so the demand for greater detail increases.  Advertisements are now tailored to our smallest, most fleeting interests, popping up at every turn.  The print on our foodstuffs has multiplied, even to become unreadable.  Farming now includes the elaborate testing and evaluation of seeds, pesticides, nutrients, and so much more.  There is no end to this tendency towards a better fit.

The more big data we have, the more we can tailor any number of things to our need:  insurances, medicines, regulations, news feeds, transport, and so on.  However, there is a problem.  As we increase the detail, so we require great energy to do it.  There are increased demands on our faculties, and on our world—not merely on us as individuals, but on all that surrounds us.  To find a can of baked beans on a shop shelf is one thing.  To have a can of French navy beans delivered to my door in quick time is quite another.  This is crucial.  The goal of a better fit involves enormous activity, and stresses our society and environment.  Media academic Lloyd Spencer writes, ‘Reason itself appears insane as the world acquires systematic totality.’  Big data is a form of totalitarianism, in that it requires complete obedience to the need for a better fit.

Therefore the crisis of our world is not primarily that of production or consumption, of emissions, pollution, or even, in the final analysis, over-population.  It goes deeper than this.  It is a problem of knowledge—which now includes big data.  This in turn rests on another, fundamental problem of science: it progresses by screening things out.  Science must minimise unwanted influences on independent variables to succeed—and the biggest of these variables is the world itself.

Typically, we view the problems of big data from the inside, as it were—the familiar issues of privacy, the limits of big data, its interpretation, and so on.  Yet all these represent an enclosed view.  When we consider big data in the context of the open system which is the world, its danger becomes clear.  We have screened out its effects on the world—on a grand scale.  Through big data, we have over-stressed the system which is planet Earth.  The crisis which besets us is not what we think.  It is big data.

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The top ten firms leveraging Big Data in January 2018: Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Chevron, Acxiom, National Security Agency, General Electric, Tencent, Wikimedia (Source: Data Science Graduate Programs).

Sample graphs. Red shade superimposed on statistics from 2000.

What Is Love?

Posted by Berenike Neneia
     with Thomas Scarborough 

What is love?  There is the unspoken view that what love means to one it means to the whole world.  This is not the case, as I shall demonstrate by exploring the word in my mother tongue, I-Kiribati.

In English, love is hard to define – or rather, it has many definitions – while in my own language, the word itself informs us of its meaning.

In English, ‘love’ may be traced back thousands of years to the Sanskrit ‘lubh’, which means ‘to desire’.  Its meaning has not changed much since then.  Today the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as ‘a feeling or disposition of deep affection or fondness for someone’.

To many, this is unsatisfactory – mostly for the reason that affections may change – alternatively, that they believe love to be deeper and wider than mere desire.  In English, the only real alternative to this is the religious meaning of the word, which compares our love with the love of God which is sacrificial and unchanging.  Yet this, too, is simply called ‘love’.

In my own language, the word for love is ‘tangira’.  It comes from two words, namely ‘tang’, which means ‘to cry’, and ‘ngira’, which means ‘to groan.’  Crying may be both positive and negative, in the sense that a person can cry if they are happy and if they are sad.  This already reveals something important about love.  Love does not change when it turns to crying, or where there is groaning.  This is by definition wrapped up with love.

'Ngira' has a further, related meaning, which is 'to sacrifice'.  Thus a person who is in love will engage in self-sacrifice.  This, in turn, needs to be mutual, to be shared equally between a husband and a wife, so that it will build a good and lifelong relationship which brings glory to God’s name.

Sacrifice, too, should rule out the possibility of violence.  In my culture, men may abuse their relationship role, and use it to gratify themselves alone.  In some instances, in which wives are violated by their husbands, men argue that they do such things out of love.  Then their behavioural beings, called ‘aomataia’, change and become violent.  This creates disunity and disorder.  But ‘ngira’ as sacrifice implies that a husband will sacrifice himself for his wife, and vice versa.  This lies closer to the religious definition of love in English.

‘Ngira’ has a social aspect, too.  People often identify themselves by the power they hold, and not by love.  The more people hold high rank in government, church, or non-governmental organisations, the more they are likely to define themselves as superior within the family, society, church, or country as a whole. Sometimes this quest for importance causes people to do harm to others because they want to be placed higher.  While power is not harmful in itself, it needs to be founded on sacrifice, to the benefit of all.

There is a related word in our language, to ‘tangira’.  It is ‘onimaki’, which means ‘belief, faith, confidence’.  This word clarifies the love that binds couples in marriage.  If both have faith in each other, it is assumed that there will be no violence, which leads people to separation and divorce – although this does not mean that they will not quarrel.  In spite of such things, there is a possibility that they will find solutions for their problems, because they believe that they are faithful to each other, and to God.

The meaning of ‘onimaki’ should rule out unfaithfulness.  Therefore, remaining a virgin is very important for unmarried women in I-Kiribati culture, and is still practiced nowadays.  If daughters are found not to be virgins during the first time they have sex after marriage, they will be returned to her parents and family naked.  To return the woman naked is to embarrass her, because she is not good enough to be a daughter-in-law, as she has already given her body to someone else.

Faithfulness also implies provision.  Sometimes marriage relationships are destroyed through the wife or the husband being lazy.  For instance, if a wife is lazy in the sense that she cannot look after her husband and in-laws, then if she lives in an extended family, as most women in Kiribati do, she can be chased away by the in-laws. This also applies to men, but is rare compared to women.

It will be seen in this exploration of the I-Kiribati definition of ‘love’ that it matters a great deal what we think of a word, and what it means – love being one of the most important words of all.  Yet some words give us little guidance in themselves, so that we profit from teaching ourselves their meanings.  The examples of ‘tangira’ and ‘onimaki’ in my language serve as an illustration of the value of knowing.

There is a tendency today to say that meanings are not defined but absorbed.  This is especially prevalent in religion.  Sometimes, however, there is great reward in reflecting on what our words mean, and applying these meanings to our personal and social situation.

On the Influences Upon ‘Happiness’

According to Sonja Lyubomirsky, a person’s happiness level combines ‘genetic set-point’, ‘intentional activities’ (choice of daily activities), and life circumstances (The How of Happiness).

Posted by Keith Tidman

Is ‘Happiness’ in large measure subjective? Are people happy, or unhappy, just if they perceive themselves as such? Surely, there’s a transient nature to spiked happiness, either up or down. That is, no matter how events may make us feel at any moment in time — ecstatic (think higher-than-expected pay increase) or gloomy (think passed over for an anticipated major promotion) — eventually we return to our original level of happiness, or ‘baseline’. This implies that happiness does not change much, or long-lastingly, for an individual over a lifetime. There’s always the pulling back to our happiness predisposition or mean, a process that philosophers sometimes refer to as ‘hedonic adaptation’. So, what factors influence happiness?

The feeling of happiness may be boosted when we’re fully occupied by activities that we deem especially important to us: those pursuits that represent our most-cherished values, inspire us, require concerted deliberation, prompt creative self-expression, achieve our potential, confirm our competence, reflect purposes beyond ourselves, foster meaningful goals, and promote relatedness. Ties to family, friends, colleagues, and the larger community — socialisation and connectedness — enhance this feeling of wellbeing. We benefit from these pursuits in proportion to how clearly we envision them, how committed we are to attaining them, and the amount of effort we invest.

The role of money in the subjective perception of happiness extends only to its helping to meet such salient necessities as a place to live, sufficient nourishment, adequate clothing, sleep, and security. That is, the barest requirements, but which importantly help lessen one’s anxiety over physical sustenance. After meeting such basic living conditions, the ability of larger sums of money to influence happiness trails off. People eventually adapt to the perks that a surge in wealth initially brings. Happiness reverts to its original baseline. (Even lottery winners, temporarily ecstatic as they believe the windfall is the key to life-long happiness, typically return to their baseline level of happiness. Their happiness level may ultimately even fall below their baseline, as new wealth might bring unanticipated pressure and anxiety of its own, such as being badgered for handouts.) That’s the individual level. But there’s a similar tendency at the national scale, too: defined as the declining effects of growing wealth on the wellbeing of populations. 

For instance, middle-income and wealthier citizens may find themselves unendingly aspiring for more and fancier material possessions — each leading, eventually, to adaptation to new norms and perpetually rising expectations to fulfill desires. This dynamic has been referred to as the ‘hedonic treadmill’. Happiness appears illusory and transient; there’s instability. Adaptation leads to fewer emotional rewards, and along the way possibly squeezes out less-tangible goals that might bear more significantly on quality of life. A sense of entitlement settles in. Whole sets of new wants materialize. As the 19th-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill counseled, ‘I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them’.

A powerful influence on happiness, which underscores the nature of wellbeing, is what people fundamentally value — their ideal, conditioned by cultural factors. For example, in pursuing happiness, one nationality may predominantly prefer situations and experiences that thrill, exhilarate, and enervate, with satisfaction of the individual at the core. Another nationality may be more predisposed to situations and experiences that promote tranquility, comfort, and composure, with satisfaction of the group at the core. Both of these culturally based models, in their respective ways, allow for citizens to fulfill expectations regarding how to live out life. 

Meanwhile, evidence suggests yet another dimension to all this: people tend to recall their personal reactions, such as joy, to activities inaccurately. In reflecting back, there’s greater clarity of what happened toward the end of the activity and diminishing clarity of what happened at earlier stages. As American-Israeli psychologist Daniel Kahneman succinctly expressed it, ‘Remembered happiness is different from experienced happiness.’ Holes or poorly recalled stages of activities get filled in by the mind, based more on what people believe should have happened, reshaping memories and misrepresenting to a degree how they really felt in the moment. The remembered experience — ‘experienced happiness’ — may thus have an unreal quality to it.

Some people believe that free choice, rather than submission to the vagaries of chance, is essential to this experienced happiness. But reality is a mixed bag. Countries that are relatively wealthy and enjoy the social perks of liberal democratic governance tend to feel confident and unthreatened enough to grant their citizens true choice (as a social and political good), which gets manifested in generally higher levels of happiness. Depending on what conditions might prompt sharp increases or decreases in happiness, hedonic adaptation will prevail. The key to maintaining at least baseline happiness is to have jurisdiction over how our choices actually play out, not merely to be presented with more choices. 

In fact, an abundance of choices can confound and freeze up personal decision-making, as people hesitate to choose when overwhelmed by a multitude of nuanced possibilities. Anxiety over the prospect of less than the best outcomes and the unintended consequences of choice only makes matters worse. This reflects how people exhibit different approaches to evaluating happiness. Yet, paradoxically, citizens who have known no other social scheme may in fact prefer contending with fewer choices. Such is the case, for instance, with autocratic systems of governance, modeled on prescriptive social contracts, which take a characteristically more patriarchic-leaning approach to decisions. Citizens become acclimatized to those conditions, where their level of happiness may change little from the baseline.

Tracking the influences on happiness tells us something important about context and efficacy. That is, the challenge to happiness — and especially efforts to control how these influences bear on the amount of happiness people experience from moment to moment — seems tied to resigning to the formidable reversion back to one’s happiness baseline. Evidence is that ‘hedonic adaptation’ is a commanding force. By extension, therefore, attempts to appreciably elevate an individual’s happiness quotient, lastingly not just transiently, by manipulating these influences might have modest effect. The situation of influences’ limited effects in heightening happiness both appreciably and long term — one’s actual experience of happiness — may particularly be the case in context of how Sonja Lyubomirsky, among others, apportions the influences (‘determinants’) of happiness among the three sweeping categories shown in the graphic above. 

Picture Post #47: Joyful Shades, A Riddle

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.' 

Mountain View, Kareedouw, South Africa

Posted by Tessa Den Uyl

For a light to shine, it has to burn something, and within this transitional process, it is able to illuminate shapes. The stronger a directional light shines, the clearer the shadows become, and without the shadows, we wouldn’t see forms but flat surfaces.

Certain shapes we can touch, but when we try to grasp their shadow, this doesn’t work. In this image, where the shadows are almost as clearly outlined as the physical bodies, it comes to mind that no problem is situated within the space of an outline, but merely in the identity of that which establishes it. 

This means that we can put confidence in the cosmic order, in which no person has a right to self-contained certainty, since everything is opened up by something else, and liberated the moment it is touched by light.

Is Popper a ‘modest’ Leo?

Posted by Martin Cohen

A few years ago, astrologer-aesthete Mark Shulgasser asked this revealing question about one of the 20th century's most under-rated philosophers for us. Popper, we should first recall, is admired for at least two big ideas: the first that science proceeds by testing hypotheses and disregarding those that fail the test (‘falsification’) and secondly, his critique of ‘historicism’ (the idea that history is marching towards a fine goal) and linked defence of liberal values and what he calls ‘the open society’. His point is that too many philosophers, from Plato down, think that they are exceptional beings - ‘philosopher kings’.

And yet... Shulgasser throws the charge back at him!

Those (like Popper) born under the astrological sign of Leo think they are kings. Do Leo philosophers think like that too?

Shulgasser continues:

‘Popper himself, so Napoleonic, the overcompensating short man. Popper's philosophical ambitions are overweening. He conquers continents. No one talks about Popper the person without noting his autocratic behavior and intransigence in contrast to his ethic of openness. Here's the Leo dilemma — the autocratic, central I versus the right of every peripheral being to claim to be the same.’

Certainly, in later years, it seems that Professor Popper lived in a house ‘supremely large in area, and adorned with numerous books, works of art, and a Steinway concert grand piano’...  But does that make him ‘Napoleonic’? Consider Brian Magee (broadcaster, politician, author, and popularizer of philosophy) on Popper. taken from Confessions of a Philosopher. Magee starts by accepting Popper as the ‘the outstanding philosopher of the twentieth century’ indeed, the “foremost philosopher of the age”! 

‘My chief impression of him at our early meetings was of an intellectual aggressiveness such as I had never encountered before [Napoleonism]. Everything we argued about he pursued relentlessly, beyond the limits of acceptable aggression in conversation. As Ernst Gombrich—his closest friend, who loved him—once put it to me, he seemed unable to accept the continued existence of different points of view, but went on and on and on about them with a kind of unforgivingness until the dissenter, so to speak, put his signature to a confession that he was wrong and Popper was right. 

In practice this meant he was trying to subjugate people. And there was something angry about the energy and intensity with which he made the attempt. This unremittingly fierce, tight focus, like a flame, put me in mind of a blowtorch, and that image remained the dominant one I had of him for many years, until he mellowed with age. . . 

He behaved as if the proper thing to do was to think one’s way carefully to a solution by the light of rational criteria and then, having come as responsibly and critically as one can to a liberal-minded view of what is right, impose it by an unremitting exercise of will, and never let up until one gets one’s way. ‘The totalitarian liberal’ was one of his nicknames at the London School of Economics, and it was a perceptive one.’

Popper it seems,  ‘turned every discussion into the verbal equivalent of a fight, and appeared to become almost uncontrollable with rage, and would tremble with anger ’.

Yet central to his philosophy is the claim that criticism does more than anything else to bring about growth and improvement of our knowledge and his political writings contain the best statement ever made of the case for freedom and tolerance in human affairs.

So who is the ‘real’ Karl Popper? Does it matter if he failed to live up to his own writings? There's a revealing story told about Popper in which he was invited to give a talk at Cambridge University ‘at the Moral Sciences Club’. 

Who did wave the poker during the acrimonious debate? I understood the Popper version of the Poker incident to put him in a meek and philosophical light and Wittgenstein in a boorish, intolerant one. Maybe I got this wrong - alas I committed myself to this in print - in my book called Philosophical Tales. 

Anyway, what is known is that Popper was there to present his paper entitled ‘Are There Philosophical Problems?’ at a meeting chaired by Wittgenstein. The two started arguing vehemently over whether there existed substantial problems in philosophy, or merely linguistic puzzles—the position taken by Wittgenstein. In Popper’s account, Wittgenstein gestured at him with a fireplace poker to emphasise his points. When challenged by Wittgenstein to state an example of a moral rule, Popper claims to have replied: ‘Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers’, after which (according to Popper) Wittgenstein threw down the poker and stormed out.

My guess it that Popper was indeed a little bit Napoleonic. Mind you, he faced a world in which he was passed over by others all the time, not least Wittgenstein, partly on some kind of unspoken notion of his not being ‘one of us’, not being quite posh enough. Popper was denied access to Oxbridge, and had to graze on the outskirts of academia as a 'not-quite-great' philosopher. 

And elsewhere Magee himself makes it clear he believes Popper is colossally underrated. Why, it’s enough to give anyone a Napoleon complex!