Wouldn't lifelong happiness make us stagnate?

Wouldn't lifelong happiness make us stagnate? No. In our genetically-enhanced post-human successors, the functional analogues of aversive experience can potentially perform an analogous functional role to mental and physical pain in our Darwinian past, but without its textures of phenomenal nastiness. Our descendants' enriched dopamine function will enhance drive, energy and will-power, not just hedonic capacity. Thus outright abolitionism is not technically infeasible - just ideologically problematic.


Taken from www.opioid.com/index.html

Thoughts? Can someone explain this in their own terms? What do you think of the response, and would you disagree?

I'll give it a shot, i'm rather bored right now
Fisrt of all whoever wrote this was trying to confuse us, but essentially he (or she) sounds stupid and OVERALLY redundant creating a very messy couple of sentences.
After TRYING to analyze what the hell was trying to be said i feel like the question and answer are unrelated. The question of lifelong happiness making us stagnate is completely reasonable as a question. My answer would be yes, we would be stagnate, but that isn't necessarily a negative thing unless all of society kinda regressed in a time like the Dark Ages. In that time people had been smart but over time became stupidER. In my opinion this "lifelong happiness" isn't bad, but it isn't necessary given the overall intelligence of humans.
Not to be too blatant but..... the entire paragraph is complete crap. I just cannot comprehend how the writer was so random in what he said. Each sentence has no good transition of topic or even reasoning for the statements. I guess in some way the begining connects parallel aspects between the evolution of beings. Then is proceedes to say that drugs enhance thought in a way that will give an advantage to society. Finally it is stated that the "lifelong happiness" isn't totally off-base, it just has flaws to its plan.
In the end i'm pretty irritated by the whole thing, stuff is just pulled out of the blue and put into big fancy shmancy words to try and sound smart (as if they knew what they were talking about).

(The only reason i posted here is because when i started i didn't know what i was getting myself into, and once i was halfway through my freakish thought process i couldn't throw it away(a part of who i am), so this was the product. Sorry.)

I do not feel lifelong happpiness will get you stangnate. In a way happiness is the absense of negative emotions, so the only way to be happy is to always deal with ur negative emotions and issues. Its something you would need to work on, to achieve, and not something just aquired for no reason.

i think happiness and sadness.. would be nothing without the other.

^^^Exactly...When you're happy, the sadness is so much sadder, when you're sad the happiness is so much happier. It's all on a relative scale. When a bum is really depressed because he ahs no home, money, or food and you give him the useless change in your pocket...He gets happy because that's so much more than he just had.

However, this guy(the author)thinks that's not true. From the excerpt, I can sort of think that he's saying even if we had total happines we would still be able to remember the pains of depression and we would keep the happiness by referring to our old pains as a kind of origin point. Sort of like, we would use our history as a way to measure our happiness. And he goes on to say that our descendants, with no direct emotional history would be so happy that their brain, filled with good chemicals, would be energetic and ready to face life with open arms...This is all very true and very interesting, but I still don't think it's correct.

I think that the real answer is not in whether we experience happiness or sadness, I think it's more along the lines of difference. We need to feel differences in emoptions to know that we have them, just like we need to be able to feel the difference between up and down before we know which way to go. So, ultimately I think that if we had lifelong happiness we would be so bored of it, we'd kill someone just to see their painful look, and then we'd all be feeding of misery, so that would be quite bad. I think the balance we have now is tolerable, it could always be more balanced, but I can be pretty neutral for most of the day, so I'm good.

eternal paradise would just be another Hell IMO. Its a nice concept and all, but i don't think it flies for this very reason.

Enternal salvation would suffer from inflation.

I really don't think we give ourselves enough credit--I don't think we have to live in a dualist reality to appreciate happiness. Given the fact that life is short, and that there are many, many good experiences we can have, and many good things to do, I think the supposed dissatisfaction of a happy existence says more about our lack of imagination and pessimism than it does about any reality of our minds.

We think the bad makes life good because we *live* in exactly this existence; in a life where everything was good, or at least easy, we would have no reference as such. Could it ever be as good as "heaven"? Well, leave that to theologists and theists. Could it ever be good as in lawful, just, enlightening, altruistic and wise? Perhaps. Not easily, and perhaps not *completely* good or pleasant, but I definitely think life could be a damn sight better than it is for people now. (sigh).

You're delusional if you consider positive emotions as 'better'...A better Life is not inheritly positive because Life is not defined as one-sided. As a matter of fact, the genius of life is that it's a circle, it can continue to go on and on and on, which means it has to be balanced. For example, the perfect sound wave in nature is called a sine wave and it looks like a sideways 'S'...It's perfect technically, because of how it exists...Completely balanced.

Life is the same way, it must be balanced in order to be perfect. Balance does not come by being on one end of the spectrum...Sure we may be able to sustain positive emotions for a while, but guess what...As soon as something negative happens to us it will completely shatter our sense of well-being, because the negativity will be like a foreign blast to our system. We'll become to accustomed to positivity that the slightest amount of negativity could be fatal.

Your immunities to diseases are built up...Your muscles break down before they grow...Infants crawl before they walk...

Balance is what we need more of, neutrality is the key to a better life. Social generics. Guess what...We're heading there more and more with electronic credit, assigning individuals numbers, making strict policies for businesses, treating everyone equally, trance music with the same time signatures??? We're slowly becoming robots who will be ruled by our own mathematical certainties and isn't everything in math a perfect balance? Aren't chemical reactions balanced? Don't atomic structures acquire electrons to complete a homeostasis and erect a new molecular structure?

Everything must have a balance in order to survive because when we teeter on the ends of our spectrums, we risk falling off the spectrum completely. Either we can expand our abilities to straddle the entirety of the spectrum at once, or we can simplify our existance to the center of the spectrum.

^^^^That's the essence of survival and life^^^^

His explanation is a bit vague...but it is somewhat understandable...
kind of helps me draw my own conclusion/interpreatation to what's said...

I take it as saying that once we all reached a level of happiness, we would soar to higher levels of being....higher states of consciousness.
In the state we live in now...it is an up, then a down (with time being that variable in the equation)...so we make gains, but there is always a force that cuts us back a step and we have to re-evaluate, adjust, and re-pursue...but with change as a constant, we will never find the perfect path in a crooked world...so how we cope and pursue decides the winners and losers.
but with happiness on a global level (as stated by the post)...fear and stiffle would disappear into openess and praise.
the sky would be the limit


as to what we'd do to fill our time in this state of being...that's left up to the dreamers

frankly i think all our emotions is like viewing an incredible visually stunning painting... Its the comparisson and contrasts between all the colors, whether dualistic or dialectic

Balance is what we need more of, neutrality is the key to a better life.

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As i agree a balance is good, but balance is boring, bland, predictable, and pointless. Living a life full of a combination of extremes, moderation, and balance makes it what it is worth. Its the contrast and comparisson of it all. Neutrility is something i preach in how corporations and governments should treat people, b/c it is fair. Neutrility is not the state i want for my life or my emotions. At least not for extended periods of time.

Pleasure is important, agony is important, boredom is important, so is excitement. And its not always the equal and opposite, but the variations in degrees that we feel.

Exactly...Well said DD, however, IMPO I would rather be a robot. To each their own, I suppose.

Does evidence suggest that people in the future will be more happy than we are because of the way the brain is evolving?

I kind of agree with DD on needing sadness to appreciate happiness, but if our brains were designed differently would it not be possible to be happy all the time?

This is why i hate how capitalistic psychology coupled with pharamacudicals are convincing everyone through paid off Dr. recomendations and insane advertising that they need a pill to fucken fix everything in our lifes. We need a pill every time we're down, everytime the thought of "i wish this day would end, maybe i'll just kill myself".. boo hoo. People think shit all the time and their not really depressed or going to kill themselves. I think these organizations are trying to make money by curing us of the human condition.

You know what? its good to lose your temper sometimes, and its good to cry, and its good to laugh until you piss in your pants, and its good to turn blood red when you get up to give a speech, its good to have courage to overcome fear, its good to be self reliant and not think a pill can do it all for you.

The idea of being happy all the time, is bullshit.

DigitalDuality said:

You know what? its good to lose your temper sometimes, and its good to cry, and its good to laugh until you piss in your pants, and its good to turn blood red when you get up to give a speech, its good to have courage to overcome fear, its good to be self reliant and not think a pill can do it all for you.

The idea of being happy all the time, is bullshit.

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I think THAT sums up the answer to this question perfectly. Happiness is a pleasurable emotion, sure..and in the end, I'd like to say that I've been more happy in my life than I've been sad, but that doesn't mean I value being sad any less.

Like a lot of people, I've had my low points...I've considered suicide on a number of occasions in my life, I've had self-destructive behaviour, I've felt like there was no way I could go on. I wouldn't change that for the world. Every experience that I've been through has made me a far more whole person than if I'd lived in some kind of utopia my whole life.

I totally agree with DD that there's far too much emphasis on being happy all the time in our culture; once upon a time it was believed that it was every person's inalienable right to pursue happiness. Somewhere along the way people started believing they have an inalienable right to be happy. This just simply isn't true...while everyone should strive for it, everyone should also accept that grief, sadness, anger, jealousy and all those other nasty human emotions are part of the ride too. There are no guarantees, and it's because of the negative experiences that we have that we move on.

Conflict and adversity breeds progress and growth. Happiness on its own really does breed stagnation, because if you're happy now what's your motivation for changing anything which has brought about that state?

--Raz--

the most ironic thing is.. people's "pursuit of happiness" is the source of more unhappiness than anything else. People are so caught up in the pursuit they don't realize that they've already had it to begin with, within them. But then again, they have all the other emotions within them equally.

Which is why i don't like the Buddhist way on thinking on how to solve that. This purity in balance, to just "be", you stop the pain by stopping the search and attempt to gain pleasure. Zen buddhism wants to deter the most amount of suffering as possible, even if it means getting rid of happiness.

I believe in decreasing the amount of pain, i agree with obtaining natural levels of happiness, but i won't deny myself the human condition.

I'm sorry but as much as i respect this belief system, its just as fallible philisophically as christianity. Its asking for your life to be encompassed by banality and mediocrity IMO. Ahh.. the beauty of neutrility.

I really don't think we give ourselves enough credit--I don't think we have to live in a dualist reality to appreciate happiness. Given the fact that life is short, and that there are many, many good experiences we can have, and many good things to do, I think the supposed dissatisfaction of a happy existence says more about our lack of imagination and pessimism than it does about any reality of our minds.

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While I don't think we can -- or if we can, that we should -- live in a society where everyone's happy all the time, I do think that everyone should have access to happiness. Some simply do not. For some reason there's some road block within them that disallows them from being happy like the majority of people. I also think that we can increase that level of bliss people in general can reach, that'd be damn good. It be nice to wake up in the morning having the potential to reach a state of consciousness appoximating how I felt on MDMA.

But to be happy all the time -- and never sad, never depressed, never angry? Sounds horrible to me. Some of the best literature, artwork, poetry and music has come from states of depression, anxiety, or anger... or anger at your depression over your anxiety. To take away all emotions but the blissing is to take away humanity. It's less about balance and more about movement:

I think that the real answer is not in whether we experience happiness or sadness, I think it's more along the lines of difference. We need to feel differences in emoptions to know that we have them

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Too much of any emotion is a burden. It numbs you out. We need movement -- true e-motion -- to really have the complete human experience. Anything else is stagnation.

I totally agree with DD that there's far too much emphasis on being happy all the time in our culture; once upon a time it was believed that it was every person's inalienable right to pursue happiness. Somewhere along the way people started believing they have an inalienable right to be happy. This just simply isn't true...while everyone should strive for it, everyone should also accept that grief, sadness, anger, jealousy and all those other nasty human emotions are part of the ride too. There are no guarantees, and it's because of the negative experiences that we have that we move on. Conflict and adversity breeds progress and growth. Happiness on its own really does breed stagnation, because if you're happy now what's your motivation for changing anything which has brought about that state?

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I totally agree with you here. What we need, as opposed to a society where everyone's stuck in this sustained state of happiness, is perhaps a society were we are complete -- where we have equal access to every human emotion.

i think if we were born into a state of perpetual euphoria that would be a good thing. i don't think happiness depends entirely on constrast with sadness. if that were true then wouldn't it be impossible for people who had never experienced pleasure to experience pain? would new born babies not mind being torchered because they had never experienced anything to constast it to? would a lessor degree of pain but still pain make them feel "happy" i don't think so. happiness is simply a state of mind, it has no meaning, it was designed to reward us when we performed in ways which helped our survival. AT MOST you could argue that a memory of sadness is required to feel happy, but still, memories are in our minds. if our minds could be fooled into feeling wonderful every second of our existense, i don't see anything wrong with that. why shouldn't we feel wonderful every second just to be alive? we're just survival based animals with a primitive pleasure/pain system. why not manipulate that system if its possible to do so for our benefit? when i get high on weed or opiates, i feel good. it's not that i just feel better than i did before and define the constast as good, it actually feels good just to be. euphoria could be an innate quality of existance.

sometimes i think that if i could be permanatley sedated, i'd want to be permanatley sedated.

othertimes i wonder that if that sedation would keep me from creating new things, if that sedation would be worth it.

deviate said:

i think if we were born into a state of perpetual euphoria that would be a good thing. i don't think happiness depends entirely on constrast with sadness. if that were true then wouldn't it be impossible for people who had never experienced pleasure to experience pain? would new born babies not mind being torchered because they had never experienced anything to constast it to? would a lessor degree of pain but still pain make them feel "happy" i don't think so. happiness is simply a state of mind, it has no meaning, it was designed to reward us when we performed in ways which helped our survival. AT MOST you could argue that a memory of sadness is required to feel happy, but still, memories are in our minds. if our minds could be fooled into feeling wonderful every second of our existense, i don't see anything wrong with that. why shouldn't we feel wonderful every second just to be alive? we're just survival based animals with a primitive pleasure/pain system. why not manipulate that system if its possible to do so for our benefit? when i get high on weed or opiates, i feel good. it's not that i just feel better than i did before and define the constast as good, it actually feels good just to be. euphoria could be an innate quality of existance.

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I don't think anybody's saying that happiness DEPENDS on sadness. All we're saying is that sadness is as much a valid and valuable emotion as happiness is...as has been mentioned, a lot of the best art/writing/music that humanity has produced has come from negative emotions.

I do think that happiness breeds stagnation though...to give an example, look at medicine. The reason that we've developed medicinal techniques and technology is that being sick or in pain is unpleasant. If losing limbs didn't bother people, why would we ever have developed prosthetic limbs? If it didn't bother you to know that you had a disease which will kill you, why would you bother trying to treat it?

It's the urge to overcome adversity which makes us want to advance ourselves and our society.

--Raz--

Balance is what we need more of, neutrality is the key to a better life. Social generics. Guess what...We're heading there more and more with electronic credit, assigning individuals numbers, making strict policies for businesses, treating everyone equally, trance music with the same time signatures??? We're slowly becoming robots who will be ruled by our own mathematical certainties and isn't everything in math a perfect balance? Aren't chemical reactions balanced? Don't atomic structures acquire electrons to complete a homeostasis and erect a new molecular structure?

Click to expand...

I totally agree, and this pretty much sums up the beliefs I hold from taoist philosophy. However, what you fail to realize is that nuetrality IS stagnation. When you introduce two chemicals together and you get a reaction, that reaction is the PROCESS of the chemicals finding balance (between electrons bonds or something, I forget most of what I learned in chem). Once the perfect balance has been found, the compound becomes stagnant. Look at it, it isn't fizzing anymore or generating heat. It just sits there as its new neutral form, and if you leave it there in a vaccume in the dark it will probably stay like that for a very, very long time. Everything, and I do mean everything, in the universe seems to be an ongoing process between the yin and yang extremes...the balancing of all elements and forces (whether it be physics, politics, or economics). Once the balance is found, the action ceases and there is stagnation.