Cito di Pense wrote:Being well-informed does not necessarily lead to happiness, as getting a cancer diagnosis illustrates.

But getting an early diagnosis arguably can lead to better wellbeing.

You may say 'touche' now.

archibald wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:Being well-informed does not necessarily lead to happiness, as getting a cancer diagnosis illustrates.

But getting an early diagnosis arguably can lead to better wellbeing.

You may say 'touche' now.

It can lead to better well-being, but it does not lead right away to happiness, because chemo and radiation therapy are a bitch. I thought we were only dealing with happiness as a measure of well-being. If not, then life expectancy sometimes suffices. Frankly, I'm happy to be growing old, because it means I won't have to put up with this shit for much longer.

Cito di Pense wrote:It can lead to better well-being, but it does not lead right away to happiness, because chemo and radiation therapy are a bitch.

With a bit of luck, in about 50 years the geneticists will have come up with a cure, for cancer at least.

archibald wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:It can lead to better well-being, but it does not lead right away to happiness, because chemo and radiation therapy are a bitch.

With a bit of luck, in about 50 years the geneticists will have come up with a cure, for cancer at least.

I thought you wanted to extol to me the virtues of 'neuroscientism'. Excuse me for asking, because thinking about the wonderful world of 50 years in the future only makes some people happier. Maybe we can call it 'futurism'. Genetics and neuroscience? That's like comparing football and baseball.

Cito di Pense wrote:I thought we were only dealing with happiness as a measure of well-being. If not, then life expectancy sometimes suffices.

I think happiness is meant to be just one component.

Cito di Pense wrote:Genetics and neuroscience? That's like comparing football and baseball.

Indeed. They are both 'ballsports'. Good analogy. Keep your eye on the ball.

archibald wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:I thought we were only dealing with happiness as a measure of well-being. If not, then life expectancy sometimes suffices.

I think happiness is meant to be just one component.

Of course. We can qualify the fuck out of it. That's what wibbling is all about. We can't really talk about happiness in detail, then. Well, we can, but somebody's going to complain about the inevitable complexity.

Look: I absolutely agree that (ideally) we can figure all this out. I know something about how long it takes to figure difficult things out, which doesn't include wibbling about neuroscience and not being a neuroscientist. I can tell you that it's going to take awhile, and we may not have that much fucking time to get all our pencils sharpened and lined up on the desk in length rank.

Cito di Pense wrote:

archibald wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:I thought we were only dealing with happiness as a measure of well-being. If not, then life expectancy sometimes suffices.

I think happiness is meant to be just one component.

Of course. We can qualify the fuck out of it. That's what wibbling is all about. We can't really talk about happiness in detail, then. Well, we can, but somebody's going to complain about the inevitable complexity.

In that video debate, Simon Blackburn challenged Sam Harris over the idea that we could scale or quantify wellbeing by telling him that he had just had two holidays, one in the mountains and one on the beach and that he enjoyed both, and would find it difficult to objectively rate them against one another. It was an appeal to relativism rather than realism, I think (still being unsure what realism is). Anyhows, it was an appeal against the idea that science could tell us right from wrong.

Sam Harris answered by saying that in theory, if one had enough knowledge (via what he called science but which he meant to be empirical reasoning) one could, hypothetically, unpick and analyse both holiday experiences and actually come up with a comparative rating . Or, and Harris said this too, we could accept that it's not a linear scale, that it's a 3-D landscape (the name of his book) in which there may simultaneously be peaks in different locations (sort of like how there are mountains and beaches).

What I might have also said to Blackburn was that if one of the holidays had involved contracting severe diahorrea and being strapped to a bed of nails, he wouldn't have too much difficulty using a scale.

Cito di Pense wrote:Look: I absolutely agree that (ideally) we can figure all this out. I know something about how long it takes to figure difficult things out, which doesn't include wibbling about neuroscience and not being a neuroscientist. I can tell you that it's going to take awhile, and we may not have that much fucking time to get all our pencils sharpened and lined up on the desk in length rank.

I can't speed up the process. I'm as stuck in the stewpot as you are. And I only come here because of the fun of chit chatting anyway. I'm not trying to change the world, or even just yours.

archibald wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:Look: I absolutely agree that (ideally) we can figure all this out. I know something about how long it takes to figure difficult things out, which doesn't include wibbling about neuroscience and not being a neuroscientist. I can tell you that it's going to take awhile, and we may not have that much fucking time to get all our pencils sharpened and lined up on the desk in length rank.

I can't speed up the process. I'm as stuck in the stewpot as you are. And I only come here because of the fun of chit chatting anyway. I'm not trying to change the world, or even just yours.

I'm not purporting to try to figure it out.

archibald wrote:Sam Harris answered by saying that in theory, if one had enough knowledge (via what he called science but which he meant to be empirical reasoning) one could, hypothetically, unpick and analyse both holiday experiences and actually come up with a comparative rating.

As I say, in an ideal world, we'd have time to figure this all out. In the meantime, the LHC and NASA are going to keep getting the big bucks. The NHS budget is larger, but it's spread around, and includes people trying to reduce spots on teenagers. If that isn't more happiness, I don't know what is, because, pound for pound, teenagers are happier or unhappier than anyone else. With some of them, a hangnail is a motivation for suicide.

Why don't you admit that you don't know what the fuck you're on about? You think you do, but you don't.

Cito di Pense wrote:As I say, in an ideal world, we'd have time to figure this all out. In the meantime, the LHC and NASA are going to keep getting the big bucks. The NHS budget is larger, but it's spread around, and includes people trying to reduce spots on teenagers. If that isn't more happiness, I don't know what is, because, pound for pound, teenagers are happier or unhappier than anyone else. With some of them, a hangnail is a motivation for suicide.

True. There is potentially a huge moral debate to be had over whether we should prioritise finding life on other planets, understanding exactly what happened at the big bang, or eradicating acne.

archibald wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:As I say, in an ideal world, we'd have time to figure this all out. In the meantime, the LHC and NASA are going to keep getting the big bucks. The NHS budget is larger, but it's spread around, and includes people trying to reduce spots on teenagers. If that isn't more happiness, I don't know what is, because, pound for pound, teenagers are happier or unhappier than anyone else. With some of them, a hangnail is a motivation for suicide.

True. There is potentially a huge debate to be had over whether we should prioritise finding life on other planets, understanding exactly what happened at the big bang, or eradicating acne.

Hands down, for a reduction in aggravation, it's going to be eradicating acne. That does not impact the LHS budget in any direct way. Would finding life on other planets fix anything? No. Theists would make up a new story.

I guess I dream in vain of your getting over this hope of figuring it ALL out. But at least I know it's only a dream. If you're just trying to prioritise, best of luck with that. See lining up pencils in length-rank order, because you can see the job of trying to get it right, ethically, in exactly the same light.

archibald wrote:

surreptitious57 wrote:

archibald wrote:
I understand there is an amygdala in each hemisphere

I did not know that there was an amygdala in each hemisphere. I thought there was only one and that it was responsible
for fear and nothing else. I also thought happiness depended upon the levels of serotonin and dopamine within the brain

I am no expert either but I have had this discussion before with someone on another forum and I came away thinking that the idea that the two hemispheres had different roles was largely a myth and even that the brain was modular enough for us to identify specific locations for specific functions was itself overstated and simplistic albeit accurate to a degree

I think the notion of specific functions for the hemispheres that pertains to logic and emotion is generally true rather than
absolutely true. Now other functions are more hemisphere specific. So for example the left hemisphere controls the motor
functions of the right side of the body and vice versa. Also functions such as speech and language. Memory is interesting as
there are two different types : episodic which pertains to images and semantic which pertains to words. But as the brain is
plastic it should not be regarded as entirely modular. The human desire for compartmentalisation I have zero problem with
but the individual regions however do not function in isolation to each other. Anyway from one non expert to another there
is my entirely uninformed opinion about the subject in hand

Cito di Pense wrote:I guess I dream in vain of your getting over this hope of figuring it ALL out. But at least I know it's only a dream. If you're just trying to prioritise, best of luck with that. See lining up pencils in length-rank order, because you can see the job of trying to get it right, ethically, in exactly the same light.

The bottom line for me is that it's fun, and stimulating coming here to discuss. Otherwise I'd just go to Facebook like a lot of people do. Or tweet. Possibly Tinder if I wasn't already chained and balled.

In one sense, I'm 'wanting to understand better' even if never completely. Like every other schmoe on the planet, the epitaph on my gravestone should read, 'here lies.....he never quite got the hang of it'.

The other benefit is joining in on dinner-party conversations and sounding knowledgeable, which is always a nice treat for one's frail ego.

surreptitious57 wrote:

archibald wrote:

surreptitious57 wrote:

archibald wrote:
I understand there is an amygdala in each hemisphere

I did not know that there was an amygdala in each hemisphere. I thought there was only one and that it was responsible
for fear and nothing else. I also thought happiness depended upon the levels of serotonin and dopamine within the brain

I am no expert either but I have had this discussion before with someone on another forum and I came away thinking that the idea that the two hemispheres had different roles was largely a myth and even that the brain was modular enough for us to identify specific locations for specific functions was itself overstated and simplistic albeit accurate to a degree

I think the notion of specific functions for the hemispheres that pertains to logic and emotion is generally true rather than
absolutely true. Now other functions are more hemisphere specific. So for example the left hemisphere controls the motor
functions of the right side of the body and vice versa. Also functions such as speech and language. Memory is interesting as
there are two different types : episodic which pertains to images and semantic which pertains to words. But as the brain is
plastic it should not be regarded as entirely modular. The human desire for compartmentalisation I have zero problem with
but the individual regions however do not function in isolation to each other. Anyway from one non expert to another there
is my entirely uninformed opinion about the subject in hand

Yes. I agree. And like you, I wouldn't pretend to know certain things well enough to decide where one thing ends and another thing starts or where the overlaps are.

I guess my general point was to be a bit suspicious of philosopher's opinions and conceptions and subdivisons about this sort of thing (the 'is's' if you like, most recently Simon Blackburn's taxonomy of thinking modes) rather than, say, science's, because if we are going to be trying to get oughts from is's (and I see no other practical way of handling morality, except perhaps to admit that it's also partly a popularity contest) then it would be better to get the is's righter. I don't think philosophy has the tools for that job (sorting out the is's) these days. Well, that's not true. It has some tools. It has thinking. So overall I'm fine with a collaboration between science and philosophy, but I think the former can inform the latter greatly. Not so much the other way around.

This might partly explain why most people doing a philosophy degree end up not employed as philosophers. There doesn't seem to be as much call for it nowadays.

To illustrate, we didn't really start to understand what the is's of human anatomy were until we started cutting up cadavers. But that didn't stop philosophers, beforehand and indeed after, making stuff up that seemed to make what they thought of as plausible sense, such as the heart being the seat of either intelligence or emotions or both, or that the arteries carried air around the body. So nowadays neuroscientists (and possibly other sciences) are effectively 'dissecting' the brain (where, probably, pretty much everything we think of as morality goes on), and I think that's the better basis for understanding, not convenient ideas about 'how brain stuff works' from philosophy, which might be out of date, or statements like, 'philosophy has long held the idea that....this or that' which may carry the weight of tradition but not much else.

archibald wrote:The other benefit is joining in on dinner-party conversations and sounding knowledgeable, which is always a nice treat for one's frail ego.

You're not at those sorts of dinner parties because you really want to be, are you?

Cito di Pense wrote:

archibald wrote:The other benefit is joining in on dinner-party conversations and sounding knowledgeable, which is always a nice treat for one's frail ego.

You're not at those sorts of dinner parties because you really want to be, are you?

One has to network in my line of work and I'd rather have food involved than walking around a golf course.

But yes, I confess I do enjoy dinner parties. They're a lot like coming here in a way.

I also like to prattle on, as you may have noticed. Me and zoon both. I wonder if we could devise a way of working out which of us is morally more reprehensible or laudable.

By the way, if you'd like me to admit that I don't, really, know what I'm talking about, I might be able to facilitate that.

archibald wrote:One has to network in my line of work...

OK, then. I was thinking, "PC Archibald".

Cito di Pense wrote:

archibald wrote:One has to network in my line of work...

OK, then. I was thinking, "PC Archibald".

Possibly. Or the opposite. Think 'criminal network' and 'mole'.

Or even just 'imposter'. One can get a police uniform on ebay for very little these days. For the contents of some poor unfortunate victim's wallet in fact.