Posted Saturday, 30 July 2011
Aristotle enshrines happiness as a central purpose of human life and a goal in itself. Examining this closely leads us to a deeper question: are humans simply pleasure-seeking automaton or something more? We have to question the nature of happiness, how invariant it is, and what it means to us.
Instincts are the result of years of genetic evolution. They've programmed us to feel happy when we do something that's genetically desirable. Natural selection has ensured that the traits that made our ancestors survive has been passed onto us, and the animal in us is programmed with all these survival instincts. I like to think of humans as animals with high computational power at their disposal. That computational power too, has developed over generations of evolution: at the time, the bottleneck in species survival had less to do with physical characteristics, and more to do with the ability to think through a survival problem and design a solution.
There is nothing divine about our instincts. Many of those instincts are not desirable in modern society. For instance, the desire for high-calorie items has come out of years of food insecurity. Today, excessive and reckless eating leads to obesity. The raw aggression shown by males in a species when they're searching for suitable mates is something modern society looks down upon. Irrational prejudice is yet another example: when being chased by a predator, instead of objectively evaluating the strength and agility of the opponent, the prey simply runs as fast as it can. It's a shortcut that helps in day-to-day life by caching and short-circuiting frequent computations. Unfortunately, after a while, many people forget that it was a shortcut in the first place and fail to look beyond it.
Does that mean that we should override every possible instinct and emotion using our higher rationality? That sort of extremism leads to a different kind of problem: humans will turn into computers the inability to produce creative work. Apart from this, it creates a huge amount of internal conflict: the instinct says one thing, and rationality says the exact opposite thing. Instead of fighting instinct with rationality, we must train so as to align both of them.
Happiness is meaningless. It is neither divine nor invariant- people can program themselves to feel happy when they do something right using simple incentive mechanisms. It's as mechanical as training a dog. Modern society constantly tries to design incentives to get its members to behave in a certain way. For instance, by giving away prestigeous awards to people who do ground-breaking research, it essentially ensures that the people who contribute most to society are generally happy.
Yes, a well-trained human being doing the things that she likes is generally happy. My point is that this is incidental, not fundamental. For this reason, following happiness blindly without designing the correct incentive mechanisms and without the proper mental training can lead to a meaningless animal-like existence.