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What is happiness?
What, in your opinion, defines a happy life? What are your goals? What is your mindset if you fail to achieve a goal and are forced to find happiness in unexpected ways? How do you deal with good fortune?
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Re: What is happiness?
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For me, happiness is to do what you like to do, with the ones you like to be with, either friends, relatives and lovers. |
Re: What is happiness?
Happiness.
Is being somewhere other than life in my teen-age common life, Listening to music and socializing. That's when I'm happy. In terms of when I'm over 21. Well that all depends on my future job, lover and kids doesn't it. I'd say If I was in a muscle car, with my best friend who helped me through classes to get where I am. In a highway to a fantaaastic city. Truth. |
Re: What is happiness?
I remember being happy only in comparison to not being happy which is what I am now.
(this is more than a song reference for a lot of people) |
Re: What is happiness?
I believe that happiness is when you actually forget yourself because you enjoy something.
An happy life is basically the same thing as being happy except on a long period of time. (with good memories, good friends etc. whatever you can think that would constitute something that would lead yourself to happiness.) My goal is to live as old as possible and do the above as much as possible. If i fail to achieve this i'll just look for alternatives to do the above but i don't think it's something that can be failed unless you get in a seriously depressive mindset. I mean, i could be in terminal phase in an hospital bed and laugh at the situation regardless of the facts because in the end it doesn't really matter. Good fortune is always welcome but it's not something you want to rely on too much. We could complicate the question a little more by saying something along the lines of do you need to experience true sadness to find true happiness? |
Re: What is happiness?
Happiness - A moment in when no negative or neutral emotions exist as a majority. (This isn't my exact definition but it's something similar.)
By the way, the best definition is one that can apply to all situations and be true at the same time. (Some people tend to forget about that). Also, the happier we are, the easier it is to make us unhappy. Just stating. EDIT: Quote:
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Re: What is happiness?
I think about this all the time.
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As far as I have observed in my whole life, dissatisfaction is only possible when you already have the perspective of something satisfactory. But the contrary is not true. E.G: If you have never felt the actual satisfaction of being rich and never saw anyone rich, then you have very little perspective of this happiness. It's entirely possible that you are happy even though you are not rich. However, if you become rich and feel the satisfaction it proportionates, your standards will rise, and with it your expectations and desires, so you'll also become harder to satisfy. If you ever become poor again, you will feel really bad. I also believe that pain itself is only bad because we have a notion of physical comfort and because of it's meaning (your life could be in danger). And also a local example: once you get used to get perfects all the time, a single "good" is actually a pretty bad thing. But you don't really care about it before you actually feel the satisfaction of AAAing songs. To sum up: everything that's bad is really a lack of something good, but it cannot be said that good is a lack of bad. Happiness is an actual thing, and unhappiness exists due to contrast (much like light and the concept of darkness, there is no actual "dark force", just lack of light) Quote:
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Re: What is happiness?
I think happiness is subjective. Some people are happy playing video games all day in their basement while this seems like utter and complete failure to others. Personally, happiness for me right now involves being with the person I love in my basement watching a movie. In the long run, happiness is having a good career, a good salary, and having a nice apartment with the person I love. In the long run, my main goal is to get married and have a stable life. For others this might seem boring. I have a friend that dream of being a famous singer. That is happiness for her while being in the spotlight is my worst fear.
I also don't think you need to feel happy all the time to be happy. I'm not always happy with my significant other. We fight and sometimes I get bored in my relationship, but overall I am happier in my relationship than I would be if I weren't in it. I think when people think about being happy they believe that means they always have to feel the emotion of being happy, which is impossible. Being sad, angry, and depressed are all necesary and healthy emotions, and without them, you would never be able to appreciate the times that you feel true and utter happiness. |
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Re: What is happiness?
A happy life is one where we listen to our inner self and recognize our individualized needs AND apply these findings to our lives. You know you are successful when you find you are excited to do things in general and you are able to provide for yourself confidentally.
Goals: -Do what I want to do for the majority of my time. -Satisfy school work. -Love myself. -Meet people. -Make the world a better place everyday. -Help other people. -Personal impossible badge quest on kongregate. In Highschool (I'm now a freshman in college) I wanted to find happiness by becoming social with people in my school but I found it impossible for me. I couldn't pass that goal and it was unbearable to face and it seemed like no one could or would help me. I had to turn myself to something else. A distraction. I discovered poker and found happiness unexpectedly with that for 2 and a half years in the darkest time in my life. Poker clicked for me because I am very good at it, it's all about reading people which I love to do, it helps me meet people, my self doubt would completely leave me while playing the game. Last summer I made a average summer job's worth of money playing poker in Canada with friends after I turned 18 (unfortunately out of the 6 of us we were down plenty because 4 out of 6 of us were not very good. Almost everyone loses money playing poker in casinos. You really have to know what you are doing). But since college started I've pretty much stopped playing poker because I haven't needed it anymore. It also taught me to think for myself because my parents were all anti poker and I had to pretty much play in secret. The fact that they were wrong about it being a luck game made me come to the realization that my parents are human and that I need to think for myself to get to where I want in life. Poker made me a better, more well rounded, and satisfied person. It was unexpected, but I just went with it. And if I ever need it again, it will always be right there. When I am very fortunate (which has been pretty much all of my life up to now) I think that maybe sometime in the future, I won't be as fortunate. And I have to prepare myself mentally for times like those. That's how the "just do the school work" mindset clicked in a couple months ago. I just compare doing the work to getting a badge by completing it (kongregate) and it's almost exciting rather than unbearable. A little over a month ago I lost my back pack with my DS and all the games inside. My 128 Gig i-pod and a couple other things of smaller value which added up to about 700 dollars worth of stuff. I just left it somewhere carelessly and I searched for it for a week and couldn't find it. So I assumed it was stolen because I live in a college where most people are just getting by financially. 4 weeks later I get a notification online that my backpack is in the front desk of the library. I run to the library and ask if they have it and sure enough the student worker at the desk finds it in the back and just hands it to me without checking my ID or anything. I look inside and EVERYTHING is still there after 4 weeks. That is UNBELIEVABLY fortunate. Anyone could have taken it at anytime. I've learned from this fortunate experience to keep better track of my stuff. Which I have been doing since. A happy life is (more simply put) one filled with individualized self improvement. |
Re: What is happiness?
I forgot to answer the questions from the first post...
Like many people have said, the things which make someone happy are relative. Most of my happiness comes from the feeling that I am improving in some aspect. My current biggest goal is to publish my sci-fi book series and make my ideas known to as many people as possible. That would make me very happy. If I fail to achieve it... I guess I'll try to create something else. |
Re: What is happiness?
The healthy body has a natural propensity for elevated moods, because it deals with problems more easily. So, with mood being homeostatic, wellbeing is the answer.
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For me, true happiness is being with the one I love. Pretty much any other form of happiness I receive from the world around me goes away by the end of the day.
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Re: What is happiness?
In my opinion, happiness is finding what you're good at, what you love to do, the people you love, and keeping the things you love most happy as well.
There's no one thing that happiness can be seeing as it's really just a release of dopamine. Being a genuinely nice person, brings genuine happiness to me and the people around me, even if it's only temporary. If you fail to achieve you have to consider, are my standards too high, or did I not try hard enough? Usually in my case, it's because my standards are FAR beyond what they should be to any situation, because given chance of success the reward becomes much greater, therefore, more happiness. If you became lazy and didn't strive, then the question to ask am I just happier being lazy, or do I want to better myself to make myself happy? |
Re: What is happiness?
I also see the "standards" matter like this:
If your satisfactory models aren't too difficult to reach, you can have a good deal of happiness even if things aren't perfectly according to the model. If your models are too harsh (you're a perfectionist) the tolerance value will be too small and it will be much harder to gain happiness, but it will be MUCH more intense (think of a normal distribution with very small deviation). I think I'm usually in the second group, but I also try very hard, so I'm usually happy. |
Re: What is happiness?
It cannot be achieved because there is no such thing as 'happiness'.
The only lasting and powerful feelings are those of hatred. To me, happiness is just an illusion, silly daydreaming and a complete waste of time. Humanity would never evolve through happiness. The urge to kill, to dominate, to have revenge, these will make one achieve perfection. This is such a matter of perspective though. |
Re: What is happiness?
Happiness is whatever makes you feel good in my opinion.
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Actually, the only reason people do these things at all is to achieve happiness. |
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I suppose that personal opinion is an alien term around here.
Technological evolution gets a 1000% boost during wartime. And war is, of course, caused by hatred/xenofobia between nations and/or races. We would hardly evolve while everybody is happy and there are no needs. We would stagnate. Why do I have to be considered as a troll/raging kid just for seeing things from a different angle? Quote:
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Re: What is happiness?
happiness is the lack of depression
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Re: What is happiness?
serious answer
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Re: What is happiness?
Sad people piss me off.
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Oh and there's no need for Internet clichés such as Sad people piss me off. I though this was critical thinking or something. |
Re: What is happiness?
It's hard to take you seriously and not believe you're a troll after you first post, but let's analyze this anyway:
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E.g: I love ice cream. You decided to destroy every ice cream factory in the planet. Therefore, I hate you. I love comfort. X causes me pain, which confronts my comfort. Therefore, I hate X. You need to love something before you can hate another, but you don't need to hate something before you can love another (I didn't hate anything related to the lack of ice cream before I ate ice cream for the first time). Well, that proves that hatred is always equal or lesser than love. Can you think of something you hate that doesn't go against something you love? Quote:
Conflict exists only because there are things that threaten satisfaction. If the satisfactory feeling didn't exist, THERE WOULD BE NO CONFLICT, and, therefore, no evolution. Quote:
Most people I know who consider themselves "sad" most of the time don't really have a good reason to feel that way, they're just either incompetent, weak willed or actually ill. |
Re: What is happiness?
Well, you surely have a point there.
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This debate actually got us somewhere. Apparently it's all about whether satisfaction and happiness are the same thing or not. Someone else's suffering might satisfy you but it won't make you happy. Admit it or not, we ended up sharing roughly the same opinion. But still from somewhat opposing viewing angles. I don't really know whether I'm incompetent, weak willed or just ill but this is my opinion and I'm happy to have had the opportunity to debate this matter alongside with you. |
Re: What is happiness?
Revenge can be satisfying. I would consider satisfaction the same or very similar to happiness. Someone else's suffering could easily make you happy and satisfied if you are that kind of person.
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But most of the time I just refer to "happiness" as an intense and durable satisfaction. Quote:
But you really are sad and don't see a reason for it? Did you lose something? Did something affect your perspective of life? |
Re: What is happiness?
From where I standing now, happiness is a sense of satisfaction for me, such as satisfaction from family,friends or maybe your career.
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As for satisfaction being generally equal to happiness, let's look at it in an a-b prospective. If I am satisfied with a situation, then I am happy If I am happy, then I am satisfied with a situation When flipping these two variables, the statement still remains true. As I cannot personally think of any experience where I was not satisfied but happy, or happy but not satisfied. This does not mean that you must be absolutely satisfied to gain happiness, but the amount of happiness you will receive will be dependent on how satisfied with a situation you are. As you all know that happiness can come at a variety of different levels for an individual, and this is based off of the amount of satisfaction one has regarding the situation: If, as an example, I were to take a test: 100: Fully satisfied with my results 97: Generally satisfied 94: still decently satisfied 85: not very satisfied 65: loathe the result (severe dissatisfaction) You can again replace all of the words "satisfied" with the word "happy" and come to the same conclusion of how I am feeling. Now again how MUCH happiness is dependent on the amount of satisfaction you get, which also depends on how much this particular thing affects you in life. Like: Rose in my yard is not stepped on: No satisfaction / dissatisfaction) Rose in my yard is stepped on: No satisfaction / dissatisfaction) To a Gardner, this may be very different...maybe they love Roses, and this could severely dissatisfy them to step on the Rose (making them, in turn, severely unhappy). |
Re: What is happiness?
So many things to say...
"I believe that happiness is when you actually forget yourself because you enjoy something." Not for me. My utmost happiness has come from instances when I'm fully engrossed in myself. I guess I feel like I 'forget myself' while doing any number of menial tasks too, and I certainly don't find that to be happiness. "Quote: Originally Posted by rushyrulz I remember being happy only in comparison to not being happy which is what I am now. (this is more than a song reference for a lot of people) This is horrible, and can't possibly be true. Your life can't be a constant lowering of your happiness level. You'd eventually stop feeling bad at all if you never felt any sort of happiness (this is not a paradox. You'd just feel neutral). I've heard of this happening many times when people are held in captivity for too long, for example." I don't know how to tell you you're wrong, except from personal experience you are so wrong mhss. The perception that the happy times of your life have always been in the past is one that I've possessed before. No matter what your logic about emotions dictates, it runs counter to some people's perceptions, and if I perceive I have been unhappy for 10 years, then I really have been unhappy for 10 years at the moment that that thought happens. Whether or not that is possible is irrelevant, because its possible to feel that that's the case. You're also assuming that emotions are always controlled by the outside, which they aren't. People can be more or less chronically happy or chronically depressed. And then there's other, non-social things that change from day to day, like being tired and having PMS. |
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Happiness is nonexistent.
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"Hatred only exists when something you love is confronted in some way, threatened or destroyed, be it a person, object or whatever."
So when I flip out in a hatred and rage and start to break **** over the world sucking because I have crumbs on the kitchen floor one morning, though I've never really cared about having crumbs on my kitchen floor before, certainly never enough to elicit such a reaction from myself, it is because I love my floor at that one point in time? "You need to love something before you can hate another, but you don't need to hate something before you can love another (I didn't hate anything related to the lack of ice cream before I ate ice cream for the first time). Well, that proves that hatred is always equal or lesser than love." Sentence 2 follows sentence 1, but sentence one is unfounded. For instance, I don't need to love not being in pain to hate someone who causes me physical pain. Not being in pain is specifically neutral. And don't give me some bull**** about that's just them hurting my love for myself. I'm talking about physical pain, not emotional pain. |
Re: What is happiness?
Enough arguing, happiness for me would be I don't know what, because what makes me happy changes too often because my mind changes too often. I can think about going on a trip and loving the idea, and I can think about going on the exact same trip when I'm feeling tired, and it instead causes something close to anguish about having to do things and all the responsibility involved with it. Because of this, I've found the most success at 'happiness' in my life with a sort of middle ground. I'm doing something that's menial so that I can lose myself in it, but is something that won't petrify me those days when the thought of anything challenging is horrible. Which is, in fact, not what I consider happiness at all.
Happiness for me is would either be to have no responsibilities and yet to constantly be learning and sharing ideas and knowledge with people in novel ways. |
Re: What is happiness?
Happiness is relative to how each individual perceives the world so there aren't really any things that make us all happy as happiness is just chemicals reacting with your brain. Most people these days in North America though are depressed cause they think they know what would make them happy (materialism etc etc) and end up being disappointed. I just live life doing what I want to do.
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If you DON'T care about the floor, it's obviously due to something else. Has this happened before? Quote:
"Not being in pain is specifically neutral" Untrue. Don't you feel comfort when you are in bed, for example? You obviously don't need to love every moment of not being in pain, but pain deviates further from your idea of comfort, causing anger or hatred. It's not about whether you love your current situation or not, it's about your perspective of the best situation and how distant things are from it. |
Re: What is happiness?
Yes, I've flipped out over having crumbs on the floor when I've never really cared that much about them before. The point of that example was to show that I was not in a very sane state of mind at that time, such that the slightest thing I found annoying was blown way out of porportion. Its not that I had just cleaned it and it got dirty again in 2 seconds and I had cleaned it because people were coming over, or that I had just gotten into a fight with my bf or some other misplaced anger. I was having a typical day but I just snapped.
As to being in bed all cozy and warm, of course that's nice, and then that's not neutral either. But that's not the example; the example isn't 'I was feeling comfy and then I start getting hurt by someone'. I can also very much enjoy not being in pain when it goes away. This happens to me every month when I have bad period cramps and then I take a pain killer. The relief of not being in pain anymore is so overwhelming it feels sooooo good. In that example, the happiness of not being in pain anymore was specifically caused by the unhappiness in the first place, which is another counter-example to needing happiness to cause unhappiness. I surely would not suddenly feel relief and happiness had I not been in pain a few minutes ago. And there are thousands of examples where the usual, everyday stuff becomes enjoyable only because you experience unenjoyment firstly. Going to bed when you're super tired is much more enjoyable than when you're tired, food tastes way better when you're super hungry than just a little peckish. Playing a video game is much more enjoyable when you've been itching to play it all week but didn't have the time or chance compared to if you've been playing it all week. (Well, that depends on the game I guess.) Enjoyment of debugging a program is like the enjoyment you get when you've been banging your head against a wall and then you stop.:-p |
Re: What is happiness?
AND, to be more dumb and make more multiple posts, to bring up something I haven't seen mentioned, I think happiness is almost more of an anticipation of happiness. Like how striving for a goal is better than reaching it. I guess that depends a lot on the goal, but the anticipation of knowing you're reaching your goal, and what it will be like once your goal's reached, is often better for me than the actual act of reaching the goal. And there's things like the weekend. Friday is often a more enjoyable day than Sunday, even though I'd be working Friday (ok, well, I don't have a mon-fri 9-5 job, but you get the gist), and even though I'm doing things I want to do on Sunday. It's all in the thought of what's to come, not what's actually happening.
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That's why supreme happiness is more like drugs. Sure, it makes you feel alright and have no worries but it won't get you anywhere. Once you start drugging, you stop existing. |
Re: What is happiness?
But that begs the question, what is wrong with not trying for perfection? Why is it wrong to just have enough, and that's that?
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Perfection is utopia. We've been racing for perfection since the beginning of our existence and it can't be helped. It's soley our human nature that sets us on top of the food chain. |
Re: What is happiness?
Let's analyze:
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Also from my first post in this thread, I mentioned several examples explaining this perspective thing. Quote:
When you feel pain for too long, you get used to it. Your once high perspective becomes lower, which prevents you from going insane. Therefore, you suffer less. We tend to adapt to every situation, good or bad. It will eventually become the "neutral". But the fact remains: there is no actual "bad" feeling that exists independently. There are feelings and models. People can have very different models and even things like pain can be a good thing for some. If something is close to the model, it's good. If it's far, it's bad. If your model is too harsh, that means you have experienced near perfection before, which also means it will be much easier to make you suffer. But you can't know the "model" if you haven't experienced something GOOD before. The good feeling determines the model, which determines the bad. A simple way to understand why the "good" determines the models and not the "bad" is this: there is no model for "badness". No such thing as "perfect ugliness". If someone actually tries to find something like this, it's most likely a case of "so bad it's good". Models are always centered on good stuff. |
Re: What is happiness?
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Did you read the last answer I gave you? Also... You probably didn't notice it, but when you say that seeking perfection is better than supreme happiness, that is the same as saying that the idea of seeking perfection satisfies you more. Think about it, it's a bit paradoxal. If you think that something is better than this supreme happiness, then you don't really think that this supreme happiness is supreme. |
Re: What is happiness?
"there is no actual "bad" feeling that exists independently"
"But you can't know the "model" if you haven't experienced something GOOD before. The good feeling determines the model, which determines the bad." But you're still not backing this up in anyway whatsoever, and I feel like I've given counterexamples of these things particularly, and yet you gloss over them. I can stub my toe and its bad. Why must I know happiness in order to have my toe feel bad? You yourself agree that there is a neutral, so why must a bad feeling emerge only when it differs from good, instead of solely differing from neutral? You're not making sense. I mean, you are, except you're not really talking about anything that I've addressed. You're not addressing one of the underlying principles of your theory, you just expect everyone else to, upon thinking about that tenet, agree with it. I don't. You're essentially saying that pain and hurt, on an emotional level, only exist when happiness doesn't. I mean, GAH, pain is an opposite of happiness, but its certainly not a negative happiness...its a positive pain. It exists, its not solely a lack of happiness. We can be sad and happy at the same time because even though we like to think of them as opposites, they're still separate entities. And since they are separate entities, there's no reason to believe that they must be linked. If you've never been happy and sad at the same time, then I guess you wouldn't understand this. For anyone else who has, they'll get what I'm saying. And even if you did think they were linked, you have yet to say anything, (besides an example as to how unhappiness can happen because we lose happiness), about why happiness must always be the precursor here. It seems to me that if you acknowledge that we can feel fairly 'neutral', then we can feel bad in comparison to that. Now, I could understand if you thought that 'neutrality' never really exists, so that one would always be on the good/bad side of it, but you're not saying that at all. |
Re: What is happiness?
Timeshaper: I wasn't considering other people in the statement, but rather a determination of what we want to do as people. It could be possible that someone creates a drug that delivers the feeling of self satisfaction, and they're altruistic enough to share it with the world, and now the world's taking this drug. Yet I suspect you'd feel that this would still be totally wrong. Why is that though? I mean, why is it deplorable to not have to struggle? Again, lets not get into how the world would work and how we'd get food. Lets pretend all those robots someone has made keeps humanity alive.
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Re: What is happiness?
My form of happiness is listening to music, playing video games, and isolation to society.
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Re: What is happiness?
Apparently I have no idea about what perfection might be. But there's one thing I know for sure, the process of achieving perfection is satisfying (at least for me).
Perfection means no more process of improvement and so no more satisfaction (the kind of satisfaction that makes me feel alive), this might be the sole reason for which I disagree with it. |
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I know that you can feel bad and good at the same time, that doesn't prove my point wrong. Please, read the last paragraph of that post. "A simple way to understand why the "good" determines the models and not the "bad" is this: there is no model for "badness". No such thing as "perfect ugliness". If someone actually tries to find something like this, it's most likely a case of "so bad it's good". Models are always centered on good stuff." I'm talking about models on a physical level. There are several of them, and they are different for each person. They determine the ideal quantity of each characteristic in an object. Nobody has a truly "perfect" model because nobody experienced perfection, but everyone has models. Pain is not a bad feeling in and of itself. Like I've said, some people even like it. Pain is bad for most people because of it's meaning (danger) and because it deviates from their model of comfort. It deviates from the model just like being sweaty while standing in the bus stop does. The other fact that proves my point is that people who have experienced more happiness can suffer more. In my first post, again, I've given these examples: " E.G: If you have never felt the actual satisfaction of being rich and never saw anyone rich, then you have very little perspective of this happiness. It's entirely possible that you are happy even though you are not rich. However, if you become rich and feel the satisfaction it proportionates, your standards will rise, and with it your expectations and desires, so you'll also become harder to satisfy. If you ever become poor again, you will feel really bad. And also a local example: once you get used to get perfects all the time, a single "good" is actually a pretty bad thing. But you don't really care about it before you actually feel (or at least try to imagine) the satisfaction of AAAing songs. " The contrast is what allows you to feel bad in the first place. If that's not an indicator that suffering and satisfaction are connected, I don't know what else it is. |
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You're actually acting as if perfection would be an eternity of boredom, but you can't be bored if you feel supreme happiness. If you are bored, then you're by definition NOT happy. |
Re: What is happiness?
Again, I'm not arguing that happiness and unhappiness aren't connected. I agree that they are. I'm saying that it is not necessary for happiness to exist in order for hurt to exist.
"A simple way to understand why the "good" determines the models and not the "bad" is this: there is no model for "badness". No such thing as "perfect ugliness". If someone actually tries to find something like this, it's most likely a case of "so bad it's good". Models are always centered on good stuff." Neither does the fact that we strive for good things mean that 'bad' doesn't exist by itself. And neither does the fact that we strive for something necessarily mean its good, although you seem to specifically define it as such. People do things out of habit, out of addiction, out of stupidity, out of not knowing anything better to do. Pain IS a bad thing in and of itself. It only becomes not so if the person's body/brain is ****ed up or if you include social situations and other psychological situations, like sex or you trying to hurt someone else or you're trying to jar yourself into emotionally feeling something, or you enjoy the endorphins that rush in afterwards. This whole model thing is really starting to get annoying. You're being a philosopher about the human condition, while ignoring the human body. And you're trying to define what a model is, and somehow they're physical?, and you keep saying it's just necessary for them to use ultimate happiness as their baseline or something. But if you think that, then you could clearly understand how neutrality or even purely negative could be used as a baseline, but you've chosen to ignore either of those possibilities because people strive for happiness. |
Re: What is happiness?
So, what about someone who's a villain who strive to **** everything up for everyone else perfectly? They're some deranged person who's probably been epitomized in a comic book, and what makes them happy is to upset everyone else. If we had no ideology of perfect ugliness, then that person could not understand how to get everyone else in the world to have it. Even though for that individual, (I'm trying to use your theory here), they would be getting happiness, they still most definitely have an idea of what perfect ugliness is for everyone else, which is NOT good. As such, this super-villainistic individual MUST have a 'model' that is centered around suffering, right?
I really have no idea if this disproves your point, I suspect it might, but I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't because I'm clearly not quite getting it. |
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Sometimes, we can consider more satisfactory to do a sacrifice in order to get more satisfaction later, or we might think that the immediate satisfaction is better... But it's always for the same reason. Quote:
If we don't associate this physical sensation to the idea of comfort or danger, it's not unpleasant. I've tried this before, and so have many other people: try to ignore the notion of comfort in your head while feeling some intense physical pain of some sort. The unpleasant feeling WILL be diminished or even nullified (if you succeed forgetting about the comfort. Of course, you can't forget it completely). Quote:
It looks like you misinterpreted everything I've said about the models, and this is annoying. I'm not ignoring the human body. The fact is simple: there are individual restrict ideas for what can be considered "good" ( a beautiful person, a good cake, etc.) and there are inumerous ways to deviate from these ideas. There aren't combinations of pure "badness", something that will automatically become better when changed in some way. Can you think of a model for a BAD thing? |
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Why is a person considered ugly, in the first place? Isn't it because it's physical traits are very different from the good-looking standards? It can be deformed, assymetrical, have a really big nose, etc. Those are all examples of traits that deviate from a model: symmetrical, traits following a certain proportion, etc. There is not a model for assymetry, deformity or whatever. There are infinite possibilities that deviate from a good model. |
Re: What is happiness?
I guess I can't think of a model for a bad thing despite giving half a dozen examples. And I guess I never will give you a model for a bad thing because I have no clue what you mean when you ask that. If I misinterpret what you say, its because you're not doing a good job of explaining. Physical pain seems to fit the criteria perfectly, yet because you can mentally dull pain apparently that means that it only hurts because we're always in a state of comfort or something. You keep ignoring the meat of my discussion and counter it with examples that aren't relevant to what I'm getting at whatsoever. This discussion is going nowhere fast, and I think I'm done with it.
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Re: What is happiness?
You can't say I do a bad job explaining things when you completely distort or simply ignore the things I say.
I never said we're in a constant state of comfort, that's impossible. I said the phrase "It's not about whether you love your current situation or not, it's about your perspective of the best situation and how distant things are from it. " twice and you ignored it both times. I gave very clear examples about models, including the one from my last post regarding beauty, which you also completely ignored. If it wasn't clear enough for you, there's nothing else I can do. |
Re: What is happiness?
Being happy is when there is absolutely no sense of negative energy pulsating deep within the cerebral cortex of your brain. You become happy when something good happens to you and the only emotion you can express that feeling is through being happy and joyful. Emotions exist because of the myriad of things that occur to someone like winning the lottery, being stepped on the toe, crashing your car. All these effects give a certain emotion and your brain decides whether its good or bad. Some may feel that hurting others will make them happy, others may feel that being taken advantage of is a good thing. There are some people that can't even feel emotions. It all depends on the certain aspects of that individual and how he/she programs theirselves to project their emotions.
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Re: What is happiness?
I haven't ignored your examples of models, things I'm largely not talking about are things I generally agree with you about. But for me, an example of a concept that I haven't really thought of for myself doesn't define it for me at all. Call me stupid however much you like, you're still not enlightening me. However, what I do think I understand is that, by definition, your 'models' MUST be centered around happiness. Therefore it IS impossible for me to give you a counterexample.
I also find it pretty annoying that you took my use of the word 'ugliness' to be literal in a paragraph where its synonym is clearly 'misery', and my pargraph really had nothing whatsoever pertaining to physical beauty, yet you grasped at it and then talked about it as if to show I was wrong about what ugliness is. Who's not listening to who now, really. I'm not addressing your examples that show that happiness can dictate unhappiness, because I agree. I know. But this by no means proves what I have a problem with, which is that happiness is always first and everything's always compared to it. Let me try something else. IF models are always centered around happiness, then why does pain exist at all? If unhappiness can't exist without happiness, then why would we, as living beings who evolved into who we are, have separate feelings and emotions for pain? Why would we not solely be regulated with 'neutral' being the worst feeling, and then we'd be regulated solely using more and less happy? It seems very unlikely that if happiness were always the first thing we must feel, then we would never ever have bothered with pain in the first place, and we'd all just really be functioning around more and less happy. I said that it seemed like you must think we're in a constant state of comfort because you say that pain exists only because it deviates from comfort, but I still say that we can feel pain when it only deviates from neutral. Consider a person in solitary confinement who has reached a 'neutral' state (an example YOU first brought up), and then a rat bites them and it hurts. IF pain exists only when deviating from comfort, then your theory falls apart unless you change it by saying that a) say that that person was not actually in a neutral state at all, but rather in a state of comfort or b) physical pain is not always linked to happiness. I suppose you might say something that at the exact moment of the bite, the person was neutral, but now that they are in pain, they yearn for that comfort of not being in pain. But still, even if you say that, the CAUSE of this change was the pain of the bite, not the yearning for not being in pain. The yearn happens AFTER the pain, and the model changes BECAUSE of the pain. It cannot be the otherway around, because then there is no catalyst, nothing to cause the change to happen in the first place. And if the pain is the cause, then it clearly MUST exist by itself, happiness not included. And lastly, you asked me for an example of perfect ugliness, and no, I can't give you one. But neither can you give me an example of perfect beauty, so I don't know where you were going with that. |
Re: What is happiness?
Happiness is complete contentment and satisfaction. The actions one does to achieve this depends solely on the individual. It must be contrasted with "thrills" and "pleasure" which are more potent forms of positive energy.
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Re: What is happiness?
Could you people please stop double posting?
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Re: What is happiness?
Okay. From now on, then, if you feel that something needs clarification, ask. If we keep discussing like before, we'll end talking about completely different things and we will not move on.
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I'll try to make myself clear: Pick an object or thing that exists in reality: food, music, flowers, etc. Each of these things has several different traits. We, as sentient beings, have models for each of these things, meaning that we have a certain expectation of what something of a certain kind should be like. Nobody knows a perfect object of any kind, but everybody knows a certain quantity of each trait that composes an object which can be considered satisfactory. If some of these traits are lacking(e.g: tasteless food of any kind, not counting water) or excessive(e.g: very loud music, very salty or sweet food), then it isn't good. Okay... You said that, by definition, these models are centered on good things. But what happens if we try to use the same logic for badness instead of goodness? Let's pick an object which is usually considered bad: poop. Unlike the previous objects, we cannot think of a certain limited quantity of traits that define what "the most disgusting" poop should be like. The poop will not automatically turn good by making certain of it's traits lacking or excessive, it will become good only if it changes enough to fit in another model (like turning poop into a diamond). Think of it like this: goodness is limited to a few "peaks" in the sea of possible combinations of traits something can have, and badness is everything below a certain "height" considered neutral, that is, the rest of the sea. I think that telling you really isn't enough. You have to try and apply these thoughts to the things you see in your everyday life and see if it makes sense. Quote:
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You cannot make a world containing just "good or neutral" or "bad or neutral". It's either just "neutral" or "good, neutral or bad". It's like making a world containing only "bright or neutral", "big or neutral". No! Those are all relative concepts. If one side exists, the other one automatically does by contrast! Also, the physical sensation related to pain would be neutral if comfort didn't exist. Like I've said before, the physical feeling considered painful is not necessarily unpleasant. I told you that it's even possible to neutralize it by ignoring the notion of comfort. And I'm actually trying to prove that the negative feelings aren't separated from the good ones at all. Quote:
People in solitary confinement for long periods still have a (very deteriorated) sense of comfort (they're not FEELING comfort, they just have an idea of what comfort feels like). They will most definitely suffer less from rat bites and mosquitos leeching their blood (seriously, I've read about things like this myself in a book about victims of the holocaust. Not entirely solitary, but still...). However, if you pick some spoiled rich kid who always lived in comfort and make a rat bite them, I guarantee you: the kid will care a lot more than the person in solitary confinement. Quote:
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Re: What is happiness?
"Nobody knows a perfect object of any kind, but everybody knows a certain quantity of each trait that composes an object which can be considered satisfactory. If some of these traits are lacking(e.g: tasteless food of any kind, not counting water) or excessive(e.g: very loud music, very salty or sweet food), then it isn't good.
Okay... You said that, by definition, these models are centered on good things. But what happens if we try to use the same logic for badness instead of goodness? Let's pick an object which is usually considered bad: poop. Unlike the previous objects, we cannot think of a certain limited quantity of traits that define what "the most disgusting" poop should be like. The poop will not automatically turn good by making certain of it's traits lacking or excessive, it will become good only if it changes enough to fit in another model (like turning poop into a diamond). You have to try and apply these thoughts to the things you see in your everyday life and see if it makes sense." Ok, lets say I hate eggplant. However, if I cook it just so, take away its bitterness and dry it out some so that it no longer has that slimy texture that it usually cooks up into, and all of a sudden I kinda like the eggplant. I have a bad thing that, when taking away its bitterness and its slimy texture, it becomes a good thing. The eggplant is still eggplant. Setting the eggplant thing aside though, I finally think I FULLY get what you're saying now. BUT..."Actually, it's more like this: if there is a person who, SOMEHOW, never felt any kind of satisfaction or comfort in it's life, it will not be able to suffer. "...this statement I disagree with. "It's like making a world containing only "bright or neutral", "big or neutral". No! Those are all relative concepts. If one side exists, the other one automatically does by contrast!" Ah, but the biology for something like 'bright' and 'dim' only DOES have brightness to fall back on. We see black when there's nothing to be seen at all, and as such it is truly neutral or nothing, but as you say, because there's a contrast, we acutally have bright and dim. In comparison with physical pleasure and pain however, there ARE different physical receptors in our skin and in our body for both. We have erogenous areas which give us pleasure, and we have various types of pain receptors. In fact, even if you weren't to include erogenous zones in this, we have even more different receptors on our skin simply for touch. The same neuron that sends a signal to our brain when we get touched is NOT the same neuron that sends an 'ow' signal to the brain when that same area gets pinched, and is not the same neuron that sends a pleasure signal if that area that was touched was an erogenous one. They don't go up the spine on the same pathways either, and they don't go to the same brain areas. That's why when I take an ibuprofen and my cramps subside, it feels so damned good, but that is because there is physically, and therefore mentally, a lack of pain. The comparison to being in comfort is still valid and is likely a part of my relief, however it certainly does not account for the majority of the relief I feel when my cramps are gone. If you see that there can exist physical pain without necessarily having to have comfort, then it follows that there is a distinct possibility for other negative feelings to exist of themselves also, like sadness and anger, without necessarily needing happiness and contentment as a contrast. |
Re: What is happiness?
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But it's indeed pretty complex: Despite the fact that you hate eggplants and have an expectation of what an eggplant should look and taste like (a model of eggplant), things like bitterness (similarly to pain) are automatically out of all good models (again, for most people) due to their "excessive" nature. That's the reason why many people hate pepper, too. The intensity of these feelings is beyond the comfort range for the majority. Of course, even bitterness can be good when not in excess (like in bitter chocolate or coffee). Quote:
There are also neurons that specifically detect heat, cold, pressure, flavors, etc. And all of these things can be unpleasant or pleasant depending on their quantity. And the physical feeling perceived by the pain neurons itself is not always bad, like I've said many times. You see, the mistake you're doing is making "detecting physical pain" identical to "detecting dissatisfaction". What determines whether a feeling is good or not is your brain, and not your sensors. There is no purely good or purely bad feeling in itself, because satisfaction is an interpretation your mind adds to the feeling, not inherent to the feeling. Pain is bad most of the time due to biological reasons: to protect you. That's why the neurons responsible for detecting damage give such an intense (excessive and, therefore, dissatisfactory) feeling. This bad feeling is only intensified by it's negative meaning, danger. I gave you an evidence: the thought experiment many have done trying to ignore the notion of comfort and neutralizing pain (or even converting it into pleasure). The physical feeling STILL existed, but it was no longer dissatisfactory. There are also many people who try to deny suffering entirely by learning not to depend on external objects to obtain satisfaction (ever heard of Nirvana? There are people who claim to have almost achieved that, thought I don't think it's humanly possible). Doesn't that mean something? If you lived in neutrality since the beginning of your existence, as if you've never felt NOTHING at all, the first thing you'd feel would most certainly be a satisfactory feeling, regardless of intensity. The simple fact that you'd feel something would make you happier. Unfortunately, I cannot prove you that, but I could ask you to imagine. If you didn't have to worry about survival or comfort whatsoever, wouldn't you like an intense feeling that allows you to conceive your own existence? A feeling that makes you feel alive? Remember: you've never felt anything before, just try to picture that. It's impossible, but try anyway. Perhaps I've gone too far, but I have thought a lot about this. You should too. The things I say sound nonsensical to many people for similar reasons. |
Re: What is happiness?
My mind interprets things, yes, but does it not matter that in the vast majority of situations when someone experiences physical pain, it interprets it as dissatisfaction? The fact that we can experience pain differently doesn't change the fact that it appears to mainly exist outside of a happiness model.
I would say that feelings are always interpreted, that feeling doesn't exist without interpretation, by definition. When pain is not painful, my mind overrides a natural function of my body, and is just really dulling the pain, not changing its nature. If the pain is pleasurable, there is a whole other layer, such that the idea of being in pain is pleasurable, and that knowing I'm in pain (which is still painful), is giving me a different type of pleasure; I am now experiencing pleasure and pain at the same time, or perhaps just feeling pleasure and dulled pain if I were good at doing such things. If you think pain is only intensified because of negative meanings, then why would people have chronic pain when there's nothing really dangerous about what's giving them pain, when they full-well know that its really just benign? Those pain neurons don't give excessive pain, they just act regularly. The whole point of that biology was to say that those neurons don't ever give you anything BUT pain, and that they are 100% connected to dissatisfaction and the brain regions involved with it, as compared to other types sensory receptors which aren't. It is not a question of excess with them. To your mind it might feel like excessive cold or hot, but we've actually switched which neurons are responding to the hot and cold. Pain is not something we perceive from regular neurons that are firing at excessively slow or fast speeds. As to your last few paragraphs, this is where we differ. If a fetus that has just become into a state of being such that they had never experienced anything yet, and the very first thing it experiences is something that would usually be pain, I think they would find it painful. Much in the same way that if you give an infant anything bitter tasting, they will make a face of disgust, but yet seem to love anything sweet. If we were to look at other animals besides people, something much lower on the evolutionary scale, something with a small brain, something that doesn't have much of a mind, do you think their pain is ever not painful? If I didn't have to worry about survival or comfort, I could see myself getting an intense negative feeling of frustration and unhappiness over my existence, quite contrary to being happy about it. I could also perhaps be happy though too, it would really depend on my mood. Perhaps this is why sad people piss you off, because you don't understand just how deep-rooted it can be. |
Re: What is happiness?
I'd attribute happiness as an absence of fear, which one would normally be conditioned to feel as unpleasant. Though without these negative and unwanted emotions, one wouldn't be able to feel the contrast of happiness. Without a reason to be happier most people would become depressed anyway.
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Re: What is happiness?
Everyone has all these in depth answers as to what happiness is. The scientific terms, the speeches, is all of that what happiness is?
Personally, happiness is something that cannot be described, because it is different for each and every one of us. Killing Jews made Hitler happy, but it doesn't make a lot of Jews happy. My dog makes me happy, but maybe some others don't like dogs. Happiness is an indescribable feeling :] |
Re: What is happiness?
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The myriad examples I've shown have disproved that long ago. The physical feeling considered painful and dissatisfaction are not the same thing. Change of neurons? Yeah, of course the answer changes, but it's still not the same as pain. Excessive hot or cold can be painful, but just feeling hot and sweaty can be extremely uncomfortable and not "painful" in and of itself. Having your nose filled with mucus is not painful, but it's extremely annoying because it interrupts your breathing. You keep saying that pain is bad and stuff, but you've never actually refuted my argument that people no longer suffer from pain when they forget about comfort. Quote:
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I meant you didn't have to worry about these things given that you've never felt anything before, not that you actually lived a normal life with these feelings. Why do you think I insist so much on this "bad is lack of good" thing? Well, the answer is pretty simple: everything can be well described with it. Suffering is clearly the polar opposite of satisfaction, why would there need to be a separate entity for it if it can simply exist due to the lack of satisfaction? If there are so many examples where sadness is clearly caused by the lack of a certain loved thing, or several liked things, why would it also appear out of nowhere as something entirely independent? There are several cases in which dissatisfaction is simply nonexistent when there was no experience of the satisfactory experience related to it (that is, the satisfactory thing need to be experienced first). I have to say it again: the fact that you don't always know the reason of your sadness doesn't mean that there's no reason for it. |
Re: What is happiness?
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Anticipation related fear can be the prelude to happiness, just as easily to more elaborated fear. Proposing. Beforehand, you're optimistic, "happy", If she says yes, it's a big shot with the happy hammer. If no, well, yeah. I try not to define my emotions, as they're so diverse, and sometimes very interchangeable. For me personally, happiness is comfort and numbness without any depressive feelings alongside. With them... it's only half happy. |
Re: What is happiness?
By fear I meant the obsessive feeling of melancholy, not the thrill
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Re: What is happiness?
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Furthermore, I could take your quote and flip it and say that satisfaction exists only because disatisfaction does, and have the same outcome as you do. In fact, I would say that that makes more sense, since I can identify more distinct negative emotions than positive ones. It is definitely possible to have 1 emotion (happiness) be the opposite of many pre-existing ones. Quote:
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Re: What is happiness?
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Re: What is happiness?
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Anger: you want to destroy something that dissatisfies you. Sadness: the opposite of happiness, which is also the same as dissatisfaction, but refers to the more intense type. Longing: you want something satisfactory and don't have it. Bitterness: not very simple to define, but I see it like this: due to a strong dissatisfaction, you tend to become less trusting and less sentitive to good things, in order to protect yourself and avoid dissatisfaction. Hatred: this feeling only exists when something somehow opposes what you love. Love (not necessarily romantic) is what you feel towards something extremely satisfactory. Disappointment: something doesn't live up to your expectations, and that is dissatisfactory. Despair: see sadness above. Quote:
I already explained this: models, which determine both good and bad things, are defined by the experience of good things. The number of distinct negative feelings is irrelevant. There are many positive feelings as well: Pride, joy, relief, humor, etc. They're all derived from satisfaction. The only difference is the cause. I sincerely don't know what else to say about that. Satisfaction is a clear entity, and every negative feeling is it's clear lack. I used the pain/comfort example, but nothing seems to work for you. Quote:
Dissatisfaction and satisfaction exist in two possible forms: Models and meanings. I said that not only meanings cause dissatisfaction, because I had already explained that the deviation of a model is the primary cause. E.G: you feel a certain light pressure in your ear which means that your mother is going to die in a few seconds. The meaning is negative, but the feeling doesn't really deviate from any model. Quote:
People no longer suffer from pain when they forget about comfort. That's not just "ignoring" pain by focusing on something else, that's nullifying the primary cause of pain itself. There is a clear relation between pain and comfort, here, it's not just about focusing on a random thing. Perhaps the fact that this same thought can turn pain into something pleasurable means something. Quote:
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My point was that you cannot treat a baby as the perfectly ideal being who never experienced anything, since it clearly did. Models are genetically based, because that's what determine the ideal quantities of things in a comfortable situation. Still, the baby needs some experience of comfort to feel dissatisfaction. |
Re: What is happiness?
happiness is never having to say youre sorry
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Re: What is happiness?
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For example, not having to care about whether there's a heaven or hell. I don't care about faith in religion, and I don't think about being an atheist either - I just live my life without needing to label myself or fall into a certain group. Happiness in my eyes is also being able to compete but at the same time be reasonable, and being able to receive decent responses/answers to the questions you ask. |
Re: What is happiness?
"I sincerely don't know what else to say about that. Satisfaction is a clear entity, and every negative feeling is it's clear lack"
To you maybe, but you show no proof, and I've already cited examples that weren't, which you simply slough off as not being true, or being incorrect, due to the fact that it doesn't fit your model. If you cannot accept that your model is equally valid in the opposite direction (seeing as you think there are as many separate negative emotions as there are positive ones), then you clearly are delusional, apparently because its obvious that merely existing is pleasurable. "People no longer suffer from pain when they forget about comfort. That's not just "ignoring" pain by focusing on something else, that's nullifying the primary cause of pain itself. There is a clear relation between pain and comfort, here, it's not just about focusing on a random thing." Umm....and how would you simply ignore comfort without having something else to take its place? I mean, even if we're on the same page here, we're clearly not, because you are saying that its NECESSARILY not focussing on comfort to reduce pain, which again, you do not prove in any way shape, or form, but rather just say that that's how the model works. "That's a paradox. If pain is pleasurable sometimes, it's evidently NOT always dissatisfaction. Pleasure and satisfaction are the same" If you had actually bothered to read what I said earlier, then you will see that I say when pain becomes pleasurable, the pain is still painful, and there's still pleasure. Like if you get turned on by being in pain. The pain is still painful, even if you are getting other satisfaction out of it. Also, PAIN is always painful. If its not, then ITS NOT PAIN. Besides which, you are AGAIN ignoring what I'm saying and completely NOT PAYING ATTENTION to what I'm trying to refute here. I am not arguing that there's not a dichotomy to satisfaction and dissatisfaction, but rather that this dichotomy is not necessary for dissatisfaction to exist, and I'm using physical pain as the counterexample. 1 counterexample is all I need to prove you wrong. "You cannot treat a baby as someone who has never experienced anything. It has been in a nearly perfectly comfortable position for about 9 months. So it's perfectly capable of feeling dissatisfaction." Right, well next time don't equate 'fetus that has yet to experience anything' to mean 'baby'. And again, you're simply saying how your model works, not proving anything. If you're allowed to ask such hypothetical questions 'if you can forget about everything, wouldn't you be in satisfaction?', then I'm allowed to ask 'what if a fetus were to experience pain first thing'. Not everything we experience only has 1 side to something. My idea of how satisfaction and dissatisfaction work would be closer to something like how we see color rather than how we experience brightness. We possess a few receptors for seeing 3 different colors. From that, we get a whole multitude of colors. However there are still opposites in colors. Even though red and green are opposites, doesn't mean that yellow and blue don't exist. And although you could argue that perhaps you only need to see either yellow or blue in order for the other one to exist, its perposterous to claim that you see blue ONLY because you've seen yellow before, without saying that it might be that you see yellow ONLY because you've seen blue. |
Re: What is happiness?
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What are you talking about? You mentioned a bunch of negative feelings and I defined all of them within the scope of satisfaction/dissatisfaction. The different number of "feelings" is actually the different number of possible causes for dissatisfaction/satisfaction, which is innumerable for both sides. Delusional? I've shown so many examples about the model thing and how they do not work for negative things... But I just can't prove it for you. You have to try to apply the same logic for everything. or you'll never understand why it makes sense to me. Quote:
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Pain is obviously always painful, meaning it's always an intense physical feeling that is normally dissatisfactory. However, pain is not always DISSATISFACTORY. It's obvious, because I've been in many situations in which physical pain (only the physical feeling) was not unpleasant. That automatically disqualifies pain as a purely evil thing. Doesn't it? Especially when you consider my other paragraph above, where I repeat something that was supposed to have ended this pain issue long ago. Quote:
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Re: What is happiness?
It just doesn't make any sense that all negative feelings are always clear lacks of something when we clearly have receptors in our bodies for somethings which are usually negative, like pain and bitterness. Those are something, they are not nothing. The fact that they can become pleasant is irrelevant to the fact that they are something.
And it also doesn't make sense that you're not considering what 'neutrality' is in all this. If you think it exists, then why do you not consider that we are using this as a comparison? If they are polar opposites, then why is it even possible to feel more than 1 feeling at a time? We don't see light and dark at the same time. Have you ever read anything about expectation being the cause of happiness and unhappiness? |
Re: What is happiness?
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Do you understand? I'm not saying that dissatisfaction is something that comes with void. It's actually something that comes with feelings that deviate from the good ones. It doesn't mean that these feelings aren't something, only that dissatisfaction comes from contrast. These feelings are not dissatisfaction itself, they're only interpreted as dissatisfactory. Just thought of another (real) example: yesterday I woke up with a really annoying pain in the left of my neck. the pain itself is not very strong, but it disturbs me when I move my neck forward and feel nothing on the right side. I'd rather feel pain on both sides or no pain at all than just feel pain in only one side. (yeah, I have this weird thing. I feel unbalanced when there's something in one side of my body but not the other) The thing here is that the main dissatisfaction comes from something other than the pain. It's just purely a notion of comfort not being satisfied. Quote:
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Similarly, it's possible to feel good and bad at the same time, but for different reasons. Quote:
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Re: What is happiness?
Why can someone neither feel neither satisfaction or dissatisfaction with your theory? Explain how can someone ever feel neutral using your theory.
The biggest crux with your theory is that in order for it to be valid you must assume that the very first thing you experience will always be positive, and that mere existence is comfortable, something unprovable one way or the other. (I say that you say mere existence must be comfortable because to say so is the only way it invalidates the idea that pain is painful irrelevant of previous experiences of comfort.) If something like this is the case, then how would it be possible to ever reach a state of neutrality? If comfort just exists, like brightness existing, how do we ever reach neutral feelings, since neutral 'brightness' doesn't exist. |
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