Formula for Happiness

PeterByrom

Registered
Warning: this is long and probably boring to many people.

1. I‘m using random in the sense of probability theory. Radioactive decay is a good example. In an ensemble of well-separated nuclei, whether any given nucleus decays in any time period is independent and uncorrelated with the other nuclei. We do not know how to predict which nuclei will decay, and quantum mechanics, which is our experimentally verified basis for understanding the natural world, tells us we cannot. The fundamental laws of our physical universe are statistical in nature.

2. Scrodinger’s cat is the traditional thought experiment: depending on whether a radioactive decay is detected, a cat in a box is killed or not. This directly links microscopic behavior to macroscopic. In general, the transition from microscopic quantum to macroscopic classical behavior is complicated. Classical deterministic models can be chaotic, which means that arbitrarily small changes produce large changes later, as in a coin flip. There is quite a bit of research along these lines going on today in an area called quantum information, largely because of applications to things like quantum computing and quantum cryptograph.

3. The idea that the physical constants of the universe are fine-tuned to allow carbon-based life is popular with traditional believers, but some physicists advocate for a multiverse in which some universes, probably the vast majority, are incapable of producing life as we know it. Others argue that multiverse theories have problems with falsifiability, which is a fundamental criterion for scientific meaning: how do you test for the presence of alternate universes? Some scientists ”explain” fine tuning with the anthropic principle, which says that the universe has to support life because if it didn’t we wouldn’t be talking about it! Personally, I think the fine-tuning argument makes for poor science and poor theology.

4. I believe, based on evidence, that people can lead meaningful and moral lives without traditional belief in god. I also believe we live in a world where people suffer, both because of the acts of others, intentional and unintentional, and because of essentially random natural events. Human suffering is difficult to reconcile with a loving, omniscient and omnipotent god. Great religious texts typically do not ignore this, e.g., the Book of Job and the Bhagavad Gita. The Buddha famously said “I am here to teach one thing and one thing only: suffering and the end of suffering.”

5. My level 5 horizon looks more like lifetime goals than principles and purpose, because that’s how I understood it back in the day when it was the 50,000 feet horizon. For example, I have “As healthy as possible throughout life” and “Physically and mentally active for as long as possible” on that list. Although they are related, they actually arise primarily from two different level 2 areas: “Health” and something I call “Sharpen the Saw” because I read Covey. They are both phrased to acknowledge the realities of aging. They do not depend on the western religious tradition that I am “in the image of god” (Latin imago dei; Hebrew b'tzelem elohim) or any particular religious or spiritual belief. I don’t have any direct reference to religion or spirituality anywhere in my GTD system or even to any particular traditional virtues. Perhaps I don’t feel comfortable mixing them with more prosaic things like “Financial security for life, wife and beyond.” The Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) all tend in prayer to conceptualize God as having all human virtues. The Holiness code in Leviticus sees human virtue as flowing from God: “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” leads to “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself: I am the Lord.” Anyone interested in what was seen as a just and moral life well over 2000 years ago should read the Holiness Code, but I don’t think I need to put it into my GTD system. Of course other people might.

Thank you, and that was definitely not boring! :)

I too think that people can lead meaningful and moral lives without believing in God. The real question is whether or not God has to actually exist in order for the universe to have objective meaning, and for objective moral truths to exist (regardless of who believes in them or acts according to them). The analogy would be something like "can a person still fall down if they don't believe in gravity" (to which the answer would of course be "yes")! So it’s about ontology (issues concerning what exists and what is the case) rather than epistemology (issues concerning how we come to know about them). That, to me, is the big question that impacts horizon 5 and trickles all the way down to “call bob” on the ground level! ;)
 
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mcogilvie

Registered
Thank you, and that was definitely not boring! :)

I too think that people can lead meaningful and moral lives without *believing in* God. The real question is whether or not God has to actually *exist* in order for the universe to have objective meaning, and for objective moral truths to exist (regardless of who believes in them or acts according to them). So it’s about ontology (issues concerning what is) rather than epistemology (issues concerning how we come to know things). That, to me, is the big question that impacts horizon 5 and trickles all the way down to “call bob” on the ground level! ;)

I don’t think ontology buys you much in the modern scientific world, but epistemology is key to, e.g., special relativity (although we don’t usually say that while teaching it). Ontology just seems too slippery, as in Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God. In some sense an underlying theme of modern physics is the relation between different points of view: your perception of reality may be different from mine, but not inconsistent. I’m not sure that helps in the moral sphere, though. At any rate, “Objective” and “meaning” don’t seem easy to define. Stable finances and good health seem more straightforward. :)
 

treelike

Registered
If somebody says that they truly don’t care about being consistent, well, that’s up to them..... but I’ll bet that they expect others to act consistently on matters that pertain to their own projects and actions!
I don't expect people to act consistently. I try and predict what someone might do based on past behaviour and other factors, but I accept that it's impossible to predict with certainty what they will do.

I observe it in myself. "Why the heck did I do that?" . Then a desire to justify or resolve the inconsistency.

The inconsistency of human behaviour makes them irritating, interesting, infuriating, exciting and downright terrifying to me!
You said earlier that you think either choice would be random, but I’m willing to bet you don’t live your life as if it’s all random (eg I notice that when you reply to me, you use sentences intended to convey meaning, rather than random bashings on the keyboard)! ;)
I live my life while accepting that the purpose which drives my actions may (or may not) ultimately be based on nothing/random.

This discussion is making me realise something about my higher level lists. The items on my level 3+ lists are things I do care deeply about, people I love, interests, etc but when I review the lists it feels a bit flat and obvious. Like it could be anyone's lists.

I wonder if the issue is that I actually like a bit of inconsistency as it leads to the possibility of interesting new things I could do with my life. Things that are way beyond anything I could conceive were I totally consistent in my beliefs. The excitement of the unknown... of endless possibility.

The price, of course, is a less stable system of belief making it more difficult to complete long term visions because life purpose keeps changing.
 

TesTeq

Registered
1. I‘m using random in the sense of probability theory. Radioactive decay is a good example. In an ensemble of well-separated nuclei, whether any given nucleus decays in any time period is independent and uncorrelated with the other nuclei. We do not know how to predict which nuclei will decay, and quantum mechanics, which is our experimentally verified basis for understanding the natural world, tells us we cannot. The fundamental laws of our physical universe are statistical in nature.
Maybe The Game of Nuclei is rigged by Someone. You never know...
 

mcogilvie

Registered
Maybe The Game of Nuclei is rigged by Someone. You never know...
That’s actually what Bell’s inequality tests for. Hidden marks on the backs of the cards that you can only read with special glasses.
Of course, one can never rule out an actual “miracle”, like a world created 5,000 years ago with seeming dinosaur fossils to “test our faith.”
 

TesTeq

Registered
That’s actually what Bell’s inequality tests for. Hidden marks on the backs of the cards that you can only read with special glasses.
Of course, one can never rule out an actual “miracle”, like a world created 5,000 years ago with seeming dinosaur fossils to “test our faith.”
My cat "thinks" that it's a miracle that her food magically appears in the drawer so we can take it and put it in her bowl.
We can be higher level cats of the universe... or Matrix... ;)
 

gtdstudente

Registered
I don't expect people to act consistently. I try and predict what someone might do based on past behaviour and other factors, but I accept that it's impossible to predict with certainty what they will do.

I observe it in myself. "Why the heck did I do that?" . Then a desire to justify or resolve the inconsistency.

The inconsistency of human behaviour makes them irritating, interesting, infuriating, exciting and downright terrifying to me!

I live my life while accepting that the purpose which drives my actions may (or may not) ultimately be based on nothing/random.

This discussion is making me realise something about my higher level lists. The items on my level 3+ lists are things I do care deeply about, people I love, interests, etc but when I review the lists it feels a bit flat and obvious. Like it could be anyone's lists.

I wonder if the issue is that I actually like a bit of inconsistency as it leads to the possibility of interesting new things I could do with my life. Things that are way beyond anything I could conceive were I totally consistent in my beliefs. The excitement of the unknown... of endless possibility.

The price, of course, is a less stable system of belief making it more difficult to complete long term visions because life purpose keeps changing.
The inconsistency of human behaviour makes them irritating, interesting, infuriating, exciting and downright terrifying to me! Agree with the understanding the cause as being Fallen Human Behaviour, while attributing interesting and exciting to good Human Behaviour.
But the universe IS random and any meaning is what we attribute to it by our own preconceived notions.
If sunrise and sunset is part of the universe . . . why does that seems orderly?
 
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gtdstudente

Registered
Warning: this is long and probably boring to many people.

1. I‘m using random in the sense of probability theory. Radioactive decay is a good example. In an ensemble of well-separated nuclei, whether any given nucleus decays in any time period is independent and uncorrelated with the other nuclei. We do not know how to predict which nuclei will decay, and quantum mechanics, which is our experimentally verified basis for understanding the natural world, tells us we cannot. The fundamental laws of our physical universe are statistical in nature.

2. Schrodinger’s cat is the traditional thought experiment: depending on whether a radioactive decay is detected, a cat in a box is killed or not. This directly links microscopic behavior to macroscopic. In general, the transition from microscopic quantum to macroscopic classical behavior is complicated. Classical deterministic models can be chaotic, which means that arbitrarily small changes produce large changes later, as in a coin flip. There is quite a bit of research along these lines going on today in an area called quantum information, largely because of applications to things like quantum computing and quantum cryptograph.

3. The idea that the physical constants of the universe are fine-tuned to allow carbon-based life is popular with traditional believers, but some physicists advocate for a multiverse in which some universes, probably the vast majority, are incapable of producing life as we know it. Others argue that multiverse theories have problems with falsifiability, which is a fundamental criterion for scientific meaning: how do you test for the presence of alternate universes? Some scientists ”explain” fine tuning with the anthropic principle, which says that the universe has to support life because if it didn’t we wouldn’t be talking about it! Personally, I think the fine-tuning argument makes for poor science and poor theology.

4. I believe, based on evidence, that people can lead meaningful and moral lives without traditional belief in god. I also believe we live in a world where people suffer, both because of the acts of others, intentional and unintentional, and because of essentially random natural events. Human suffering is difficult to reconcile with a loving, omniscient and omnipotent god. Great religious texts typically do not ignore this, e.g., the Book of Job and the Bhagavad Gita. The Buddha famously said “I am here to teach one thing and one thing only: suffering and the end of suffering.”

5. My level 5 horizon looks more like lifetime goals than principles and purpose, because that’s how I understood it back in the day when it was the 50,000 feet horizon. For example, I have “As healthy as possible throughout life” and “Physically and mentally active for as long as possible” on that list. Although they are related, they actually arise primarily from two different level 2 areas: “Health” and something I call “Sharpen the Saw” because I read Covey. They are both phrased to acknowledge the realities of aging. They do not depend on the western religious tradition that I am “in the image of god” (Latin imago dei; Hebrew b'tzelem elohim) or any particular religious or spiritual belief. I don’t have any direct reference to religion or spirituality anywhere in my GTD system or even to any particular traditional virtues. Perhaps I don’t feel comfortable mixing them with more prosaic things like “Financial security for life, wife and beyond.” The Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) all tend in prayer to conceptualize God as having all human virtues. The Holiness code in Leviticus sees human virtue as flowing from God: “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” leads to “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself: I am the Lord.” Anyone interested in what was seen as a just and moral life well over 2000 years ago should read the Holiness Code, but I don’t think I need to put it into my GTD system. Of course other people might.
Always looking forward to when every tear will be wiped away!
 

PeterByrom

Registered
I do need to pickup on the quote from user @Oogiem: (I missed it first time!)

“But the universe IS random and any meaning is what we attribute to it by our own preconceived notions.”

The problem with this statement is that it self-refutes. It’s trying to communicate a non-random, meaningful truth about the universe (ie the claim that the universe is, as a matter of fact, random), and it’s trying to argue that any meaning is something that we attribute to it by our own preconceived notions... So, is *that* statement merely an expression of Oogiem’s preconceived notions? Or is it supposed to be an exception (ie a non-random, meaningful fact about the universe which is not constrained merely to Oogiem’s own preconceived notions, but is actually applicable to everybody even if their preconceived notions differ)?

This is the kind of thing that we should always be on the lookout for: there are lots of ways in which, if we’re not careful, we yank the rug out from beneath ourselves. It’s similar to when somebody says “there is no truth” .... is *that* true? ;)

Hence why this keeps coming back to the GTD Horizons. Inconsistency in the lived, messy human experience is of course to be expected, but an incoherent or self-refuting worldview is a recipe for disaster. At some point, the self-contradictions in the fundamental philosophical foundations will collide like tectonic plates, and reverberate across and up and down those horizons (even if, purely pragmatically, somebody has been getting years of efficiency out of their system). It’s always worth identifying those contradictions to find out where the opportunity is to refine one’s exploration, premises and thinking.

Definitely more subtle territory than defining a project and its next actions, but I think it has a profound impact on this question of happiness and how one pursues it.
 
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farrellreina

Registered
I think the elements you have listed above are just theory, it's not only for happiness but also for a healthy life. However, it is not right for everyone because each person has different formula for their lives even me. This depends on the condition and outside elements of each person. It's more like an open topic with different types of answer.
 

Oogiem

Registered
The problem with this statement is that it self-refutes. It’s trying to communicate a non-random, meaningful truth about the universe (ie the claim that the universe is, as a matter of fact, random), and it’s trying to argue that any meaning is something that we attribute to it by our own preconceived notions...
OK So split it up into the 2 separate parts.

1) All evidence and all existing experiemnts have shown that the Universe is random, See the much better explanation of it earlier by @mcogilvie I use random in the physics sense and in the way random assortment of genes happens and so on.

2) Humans do not like to live with random. So we need to put some meaning into the random actions that make up existence in this particular time/space continum. I posit that such meaning is based almost entirely on what we expect to see, our previous experiences and our basic knowledge of science. I simplified it by stating that the universe becomes what we see and recognize, my way of saying our preconceived notions of what we expect will form our world view. The hardest thing a scientist has to do is to thinkg up something completely novel and figure out of there is a way to prove or disprove that theory.

The fact that so many humans believe a number of things that are BS that have been proven over and over by science not to be accurate is baffling to me.
 

PeterByrom

Registered
OK So split it up into the 2 separate parts.

1) All evidence and all existing experiemnts have shown that the Universe is random, See the much better explanation of it earlier by @mcogilvie I use random in the physics sense and in the way random assortment of genes happens and so on.

2) Humans do not like to live with random. So we need to put some meaning into the random actions that make up existence in this particular time/space continum. I posit that such meaning is based almost entirely on what we expect to see, our previous experiences and our basic knowledge of science. I simplified it by stating that the universe becomes what we see and recognize, my way of saying our preconceived notions of what we expect will form our world view. The hardest thing a scientist has to do is to thinkg up something completely novel and figure out of there is a way to prove or disprove that theory.

The fact that so many humans believe a number of things that are BS that have been proven over and over by science not to be accurate is baffling to me.

The problem though with saying that people don’t like to live with randomness, therefore they put meaning into it, is that it commits the genetic fallacy of trying to invalidate a point of view by attempting an explanation of how the view originates. Even if somebody hated the idea of a random universe and therefore they read purpose and order into it, that doesn’t show that the order and purpose isn’t true (it’s just that that particular person would have a lousy basis for affirming it). The question of randomness vs purpose needs settling on the basis of evidence and argument.

And when it comes to that question of evidence and argument, I do think there’s a little bit of equivocation here too that needs ironing out, (though do, @Oogiem, please let me know if I‘ve mis-read your argument at any point). On the one hand, “random” is being used to describe certain kinds of subatomic activities as defined within physics; but then on the other hand, “random” seems to be being used on the broader, metaphysical scale to mean that the entire universe / realm of existence is meaningless / purposeless.

Think back to the example from biology: it would be a fallacy for me to say that because genetic mutations are random (in the sense that they are completely disconnected from whether they help the host survive or not), that therefore the lives of those hosts are “random” in the sense that they happen under no purpose, plan or direction. The latter is a metaphysical claim which the scientific definition of randomness cannot address. Hence, it is both a non sequitur and an equivocation to try to draw a direct inference from one to the other.

And I do think it’s worth driving home the earlier point, about whether or not we are living consistently with the worldview that we advocate. Depending on whatever definition of random we are using, we should ask: to what extent does this description of the universe actually match what we observe and experience?

For example, we are using non-random, highly meaning and information-laden semiotic devices in this forum to hold a rational conversation about the nature of the universe. Nobody is worried about subatomic activity undermining the meaning, precision, and profundities of what we are trying to communicate to each other here in this forum. We are not simply typing random characters such as jdgfdiuu it dd eisirhforeuidkfkrwweehohb tgjthfufhfkbjewrr et iihfieid BC f oh at u err kick dc nbkgffdvvdkoff.....

.....But yet, if we are really serious about biting the bullet in claiming that the universe is random, then all of our exchanges on GTD connect (in fact, the entire enterprise of science itself) would have to amount to no more than those garbled, random key strokes. Is anybody seriously prepared, intellectually, to bite that bullet? And would it not surely be self-refuting to even try to communicate such a claim? Namely, that science has shown that the universe is random, and that therefore science - being part of the universe - is itself random (in which case, why trust it)?

Indeed, if it really is the case that the universe is random, and that people read meaning into it because they can't handle it, then why should science be exempt from this? Why would science not also fall under the umbrella of illusions that people tell to themselves to cope with the randomness of the universe? Note that it would be no good to try to appeal to arguments such as "because it works", or "because it is repeatable", because this would be arguing in a circle.

So I do think an important place to start is, when we say “random”, what do we mean, and what happens if we apply the claim to itself and the party who makes the claim?
 
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mcogilvie

Registered
May I suggest, with all due respect, that we go back to something less controversial and more relevant, like a discussion of the Albigensian heresy. Very relevant to GTD.
 

PeterByrom

Registered
May I suggest, with all due respect, that we go back to something less controversial and more relevant, like a discussion of the Albigensian heresy. Very relevant to GTD.

I certainly agree this is not a typical GTD thread!

I think the reason that we got here was because the OP was quite tangential to GTD in the first place. If we can start a thread about happiness chemicals (which in my opinion is pretty reductive and in some ways even controversial itself) then I’m “happy” to end up with it debating the random vs non-randomness of the universe and its potential implications for the horizons - especially given the teleological assumptions behind GTD (I greatly appreciate your contribution @mcogilvie by the way! I’ve had to someday maybe your bigger reply so I can study the scientific claims and explanations in more depth)!

I wonder what @KMT makes of where we are now? :D
 
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TesTeq

Registered
May I suggest, with all due respect, that we go back to something less controversial and more relevant, like a discussion of the Albigensian heresy. Very relevant to GTD.
The conclusion?
The first rule of Happiness is: You don't talk about Happiness.
The second rule of Happiness is: You don't talk about Happiness.
The third rule of Happiness: Someone yells "Stop!", goes limp, taps out, the fight is over... ;)
 

PeterByrom

Registered
The conclusion?
The first rule of Happiness is: You don't talk about Happiness.
The second rule of Happiness is: You don't talk about Happiness.
The third rule of Happiness: Someone yells "Stop!", goes limp, taps out, the fight is over... ;)

Everybody happy with that? (Augh! Sorry, broke the first and second rule!) ;)
 
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