Happiness Project interview

Happiness Project interview: "Gretchen Rubin, author of the terrific book I reviewed in January, The Happiness Project, interviewed me on her always-interesting Happiness Project blog.

Gretchen: What's something you know now about happiness that you didn't know when you were 18 years old?

Mark: When I was 18 I thought that I had to go out and find things to make me happy. Now I am happiest when I don't venture past my property line. There is a world of adventure in my house and yard -- books, my family, drawing and painting, making yogurt, sauerkraut, and kombucha, beekeeping, raising chickens, making things. I still enjoy going out and seeing the rest of the world, but I also am at the point where I am never bored by staying home. Life gets more interesting as I grow older.

General Theory of Individuality

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education

One of the unspoken secrets in basic scientific research, from anthropology to zoology ... is that, nearly always, individuals turn out to be different from one another, and that—to an extent rarely admitted and virtually never pursued—scientific generalizations tend to hush up those differences. It can be argued that that is what generalizations are: statements that apply to a larger class of phenomena and must, by definition, do violence to individuality. But since science seeks to explain observed phenomena, it should also be able to explain the granular particularity of such phenomena. In fact, generalities lose potency if they occur at the cost of artificially leveling otherwise significant features of reality.

The problem with the simplicity movement

The problem with the simplicity movement is that its proponents mistake simplicity, which is an aesthetic lifestyle choice, for humility, which is a genuine virtue. Humility is an honest acknowledgment of one's limitations and lowliness in the great scheme of things and a realization that power over other human beings is a dangerous thing, always to be exercised with utmost caution. The Amish, as well as monks, Eastern and Western, cultivate humility because they know they have a duty toward what is larger than themselves.

Original: Not Really Simple by Charlotte Allen, April 19, 2010.

Family Gets in the Way of Work for Materialistic Individuals, Study Finds

Via ScienceDaily:

"Highly materialistic people pour their efforts into work as this produces tangible materialistic rewards -- money and possessions. They therefore see any obstacle to work -including their family, as disruptive. This finding adds 'work-family conflict' to the already long list of the negative effects of materialistic values on personal well-being."

The Futility of Possession

A recent study by Cornell University concludes:

... people get more enduring happiness from their experiences than their possessions ...

Possessions have value only to the degree that we consider them "ours" but nothing belongs to us forever. Possessions will deteriorate, loosing their novelty and value over time. Still, we work so hard to acquire, retain and protect them. Those efforts are ultimately futile, hence the inherent dissatisfaction with possessions.

I'd like to emphasize the experience of letting go as exemplified by the chorus of The Streets' Everything Is Borrowed:

I came to this world with nothing
And I leave with nothing but love
Everything else is just borrowed

Why Ask Why?

In The Real Secret of Thoroughly Excellent Companies, Peter Bregman writes about the process of asking questions:

During his meeting with the front desk staff, [Michael Newcombe] learned they were slower than usual in checking in guests because rooms weren't available. Then, in his meeting with housekeeping staff, someone asked if the hotel was running low on king size sheets. Most CEOs wouldn't be interested in that question, but Michael asked why. Well, the maid answered, it's taking us longer to turn over rooms because we have to wait for the sheets. So he kept asking questions to different employee groups until he discovered that one of the dryers was broken and waiting for a custom part. That reduced the number of available sheets. Which slowed down housekeeping. Which reduced room availability. Which delayed guests from checking in.

He fixed the problem in 24 hours. A problem he never would have known about without open communication with all his employees.

The process of inquiry (vicara) driven by desire for truth and communal benefit is very powerful. We often become content with superficial explanations and avoid deeper reasoning. The example above demonstrates the effectiveness of such a process. It is comparable, if not identical to, the dialectical (Socratic) methods in philosophy.

Consciousness is to Nuerons as Water is to H2O

Ray Tallis makes some interesting statements in his article, You won't find consciousness in the brain:

... my argument is not about technical ... limitations. It is about the deep philosophical confusion embedded in the assumption that if you can correlate neural activity with consciousness, then you have demonstrated they are one and the same thing, and that a physical science such as neurophysiology is able to show what consciousness truly is.

Many neurosceptics have argued that neural activity is nothing like experience, and that the least one might expect if A and B are the same is that they be indistinguishable from each other. Countering that objection by claiming that, say, activity in the occipital cortex and the sensation of light are two aspects of the same thing does not hold up because the existence of "aspects" depends on the prior existence of consciousness and cannot be used to explain the relationship between neural activity and consciousness.

This disposes of the famous claim by John Searle, Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley: that neural activity and conscious experience stand in the same relationship as molecules of H2O to water, with its properties of wetness, coldness, shininess and so on. The analogy fails as the level at which water can be seen as molecules, on the one hand, and as wet, shiny, cold stuff on the other, are intended to correspond to different "levels" at which we are conscious of it. But the existence of levels of experience or of description presupposes consciousness. Water does not intrinsically have these levels.

Via Harmonist.