Baseline Melancholia - Don't Worry Or Be Happy, Be Content

UPDATE - More and more on happiness....

In Praise of Melancholy and How It Enriches Our Capacity for Creativity by Maria Popova, November 28, 2014

Happiness Expert Paul Dolan: What Makes Me Happy by Paul Dolan, November 22, 2014

Take the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire by Argyle, Hills, and Wright, November 3, 2014

From Ptolemy to George Eliot to William Blake, A Private History of Everyday Happiness by Maria Popova, October 20, 2012

An Equation That Predicts Happiness by Cari Romm, The Atlantic, August 6, 2014

Against Happiness: Why We Need a Philosophy of Failure by Andy Martin, Prospect, August 1, 2014

How to be Happy:  A Guide Through Ancient Philosophy

What Happiness Conceals by John Quiggin, Aeon, March 27, 2014

The Meanings of Life - Happiness is not the same as a sense of meaning, by Roy F. Baumeister, Aeon, September 16, 2013

Learned Optimism: Martin Seligman on Happiness, Depression, and the Meaningful Life by Maria Papova, BrainPickings, June 28, 2012

The Neuroscience of Happiness by Lucy McKeon, January 28, 2012

7 Essential Books on the Art and Science of Happiness by Maria Papova, January 25, 2011

ORIGINAL POST:

"Were We Happier in the Stone Age?"

by
Yuval Noah Harari
The Guardian, September 5, 2014

I shouldn't be so cynical when it comes to essays about happiness, but I always am. Harari's essay, though, is a good one.

I tend to think less about my happiness and more of my qualia (inner, personal states) such as freedom from pain or fear, or the level of my general wellness. Pain, fear, and well being apply to the in-the-present condition of all sentient animal life forms. Happiness as humans define it seems to ask for too much. I can reasonably conclude that a chimp or goose, for example, is experiencing pain, fear, or well being based on its behavior. However, only humans, using language, tell each other or write, in excruciating detail, about their inner states. That is, to what degree they are experiencing or not experiencing pain, fear, and well being in terms of their happiness.

Roundabout I

COSMOLOGY

"The Mathematical World" by James Franklin, April 7, 2014

http://aeon.co/magazine/science/what-is-left-for-mathematics-to-be-about/?utm_content=buffer08918&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

I've read this essay once. My thinking the first time through kept me going to my effort some time back to understand the concept of time in a universe where humans did not exist -http://jameselassiter.blogspot.com/2011/05/time-does-not-objectively-exist.html?m=1 

On that occasion I felt somewhat comfortable that time is indeed an artifact with no objective existence prior to its invention by humans.

But the present essay has me fairly well convinced that mathematics, at least the natural shapes and processes it accurately accounts for, exists independent of humans inventing it. As I read with that notion under tow, I began to think that perhaps time might also exist independent of humans "discovering" it. The intervals between cosmic and quantum events are real. Call them time if we must.

I can ease my dilemma if I couch these notions in an explanation/understanding that acknowledges that both exist - objective mathematics and time on the one hand AND the artifactual constructs we create and use to think about and discuss them on the other. This seems to square with modern science - the objective existence of preexisting regularities (predictabilities) in the universe AND the formulation of laws, equations, and descriptions that represent and explain those conditions.

Then again, without our "mathematics" and "time" the universe would only be matter of various types, combinations, and shapes, in motion. Certain outcomes of this motion would repeat themselves (events we would describe as being in conformity with natural laws) and other motion outcomes would be novel or emergent. Period.

Let me read it once again....

EARTH

"Our Lonely Home in Nature" by Alan Lightman, May 2, 2014

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/05/03/opinion/our-lonely-home-in-nature.html?_r=0&referrer

"Nature can survive far more than what we can do to it and is totally oblivious to whether homo sapiens lives or dies in the next hundred years. Our concern should be about protecting ourselves — because we have only ourselves to protect us."

Really?! Lightman does place human empowerment a far second from the power of nature. The problem with his conclusion is his, I think, unfounded assumption that nature can withstand whatever humans do.