Evolutionary Psychology and "Happiness"

Just for what it's worth, The final paragraph of the second article:

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The pursuit of happiness is one of the cornerstones of western culture. It is so thoroughly enmeshed with our social, economic, and political lives it is hard, if not impossible, to extricate ourselves from it. But I think we should extricate ourselves from it, no matter how difficult and counterintuitive it might be, because it’s bullshit.

As with this final paragraph, my reading of both articles is mostly that they are coarse. There's no positive message here in this last word, just coarseness for the sake of coarseness. There are lots of ways to express the need to examine what happiness really means, but simply saying "because it's bullshit" doesn't strike me as a very persuasive of Epicurean way to go about it.

First off, I think that this blogger has a hidden agenda, when he uses the word "bullsh*t". And his choice of words hints that he is basically an unhappy person looking for why he isn't feeling happy in life. It makes it hard for me to want to even spend any time analyzing what he actually wrote.

I started with the second article, and from an Epicurean standpoint I think he is unknowingly focusing on the "natural but unnecessary" things in life:

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The goal of Happiness Is Bullshit was not merely to show that happiness is bullshit (in the sense of being unattainable), but to give a plausible theory for what happiness is—how it evolved, how it works, what function it serves. I tried to convey the gist of the theory with an analogy: the “getting warmer” signal in a guessing game. The function of happiness is to improve our predictions about how good things are going to be. I described the theory in technical language in a footnote. At last, I can unbury the footnote and put it right here:

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The brain computes, using evolved and learned priors, which of various outcomes have the highest expected value (in terms of fitness proxies). The higher the expected value of an outcome, the greater the motivation—i.e. the amount of attention and energy mobilized—to pursue it. “Happiness” is triggered by a positive prediction error. We feel happy when the actual value of an outcome turns out to be greater than its expected value. This error causes us to rapidly mobilize energy (if more energy is needed), rapidly relax (if energy is no longer needed), attend to (i.e., “savor”) the outcome, simulate it in working memory, determine which features were counterfactually unique to it, upweight those features’ expected value, and encode them in long-term memory. As a result, those unique features will appear more valuable to us (i.e. more energizing, more attention-grabbing) the next time we encounter them. This is just another way of saying that we are “positively reinforced”—i.e., the features that were counterfactually unique to the outcome now have a higher expected value than they did before. The more frequently we experience the outcome, the better we get at predicting its value (i.e. the prediction error decreases), and the less “happy” we feel when we experience it (i.e., the less attention and reinforcement is needed). Eventually, after many repetitions of this process, we stop “liking” the outcome while still continuing to “want” it: that is, we continue to value and pursue it but are no longer surprised by it, attentive to it, or further reinforced by it. This model is an amalgam of the prediction error theory of dopamine and the internal regulatory variable theory of motivation.

I think he is describing the experience of novelty and surprise, but we don't always need those to feel happy.

Also, one's attitude in life (whether one is optimistic) greatly affects happiness levels, and the feelings.

When one satisfactorily achieves the "goods" in life (friendship, wisdom, etc.) they will continue to bring a pleasant and happy feeling, and for the wise a sense of gratitude.

And from an Epicurean standpoint, happiness equals a life filled with more pleasures than pains. It takes both wisdom and effort to learn how and to cultivate a full Epicurean life.

I recommend this book, for anyone interested in increasing their optimism and positivity:

Matteng I found these provocative (in a good way). Have you read any of Robert Wright's books? The Moral Animal was a memorable read for me.

I have a favorable view of evolutionary psychology and feel it has strong explanatory and predictive power. That is, it often serves as a reliable guide to how people actually behave (as opposed to how we think we behave), and this can relieve some anxieties.

That said, I also think the approach has limitations.

For one thing, it tends to fall into the kind of logical trap suggested by VS40. If evolutionary conditioning motivates our behavior, then it follows that our concepts of happiness are also motivated by evolutionary conditioning--and therefore valid. It's not clear why we should abandon them.

Indeed, Pinsof appears to stumble in this fashion towards the end of the second essay, when he discusses the centrality of "pursuit of happiness" in Western thinking and says we should extricate ourselves from it. But why? The West is doing pretty well. What if the notion of pursuing happiness contributed in some way to the comparative success of the societies in question?

It seems to me that, from an Epicurean point of view, evolutionary conditioning would fall under the category of "necessity," and Epicureans believe we do not have to be controlled by necessity (VS9). To put this a little differently, Pinsof may overestimate the extent to which we are biology-driven automatons (or sentient thermostats) and underestimate the degree to which we can self-fashion, set rational goals, and take prudent steps to achieve them. Contrary to his overgeneralizing "we," some people do make a decision to pay more attention to sunsets, work less, be less anger-prone, take up birdwatching or pastels, and so on. We'd need to look at what the science says about people who set out consciously to improve their overall happiness.

Relatedly, he seems to define happiness mainly in terms of event-specific moments of enjoyment--eating pizza, getting a promotion, driving out of the dealer lot in your new car, or achieving temporary bliss during meditation. This emphasis aligns with the "guessing-game" model he advances in his essays, and he's almost certainly right that habituation diminishes the pleasurable impact of such events. It's a rather Cyrenaic view of happiness, though, and he seems less interested in the possibility of long-term increases in our baseline sense of well-being.

Again, though, what I'm commenting on here has more to do with perceived limitations of the approach, rather than questioning its value. I do think that it's valuable and can make us less puzzled about behavior--other people's and our own.