![]() ![]() There's the possibility that comparing good events to not-as-good events is what gives them part of their subjective quality. I'm not entirely sure we can get away with this. Just delete the treadmill, at least for positive events." This being the transhumanist form of Fun Theory, you might perhaps say: "Let's get rid of this effect. ![]() Conversely, accident victims with severed spinal cords were not as happy as before the accident after six months-around 0.75 sd less than control groups-but they'd still adjusted much more than they had expected to adjust. that past lottery winners' stated subjective well-being was not significantly greater than that of an average person, after a few years or even months. The famous pilot studies in this domain demonstrated e.g. This hypothesis is known as the hedonic treadmill. Then the way organisms and brains are built right now, "true happiness" might be a chimera, a carrot dangled in front of us to make us take the next step, and then yanked out of our reach as soon as we achieve our goals. Memory is a useful trick, but learning the lesson of a success or failure isn't the same goal as the original event-and usually the emotions associated with the memory are less intense than those of the original event. Achievable goals are usually located in the Future, since you can't affect the Past. To a first approximation, we might say something like "The evolutionary purpose of emotion is to direct the cognitive processing of the organism toward achievable, reproductively relevant goals". In general, though, it is a rare organism in a rare environment whose reproductively optimal strategy is to rest with a smile on its face, feeling happy. ![]() The first proposition might be true if the reproductive risks of all available options exceed their reproductive benefits. When is it adaptive for an organism to be satisfied with what it has? When does an organism have enough children and enough food? The answer to the second question, at least, is obviously "never" from an evolutionary standpoint. ![]()
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