What I really think about or Thank You J Christopher Maloney
This semester has seen me not feel like shooting myself in every class. I am not taking any physics or math classes. I don’t know if these two facts are related or just coincidence.
Let’s talk philosophy. Socrates. Socrates was an ancient Greek philosopher who had great impact on the thinkers of his time and our time. Near the end of his life, he was put on trial by the Athenian council for impiety (kind of like heresy) and corruption of youth (kind of like pee wee Herman). The story is that they were just jealous and wanted to see him dead because an oracle said that there were none wiser than he that were living. However, that’s not important. What is important (to me) is what he said in his own defense.
He proved the impiety charge to be bogus easily (I won’t go into it, read The Apology if you really want to know), but he had a bit more trouble with the corruption of youth charge. Socrates claimed that he could not have corrupted the youths because he was a rational person. He went further to say that all rational people seek value or what is good in their lives, and that they make decisions to attain these valuables. Therefore, if rational decisions only lead towards good, and he is rational, he couldn’t have done anything bad. He also said that, if he did corrupt the youths, then it was not his intention, but merely a flaw in his rationale. Something inside of him was messed up and needed to be mended if he were to go back to being a normal, rational being. He thought that he should then just be corrected by the state, rather than punished or killed, because he, like the rational people of the state, really wanted what was good.
He was then sentenced to death.
The real interesting thing about Socrates’ argument was the assertion that, at heart, humans are rational creatures. It’s a very complicated thing to think about. If we are rational, then we should always use the information we have to make the best decision possible. It is in this way that we gain value. It is in this way that we do good. But, are we really rational.
For example, lets say that you’ve saved up a few years and now finally have enough money to buy a new car. You do a lot of research because you value the money you’ve saved and you want to get the most valuable thing out of it. You’ve narrowed it down to two cars. Car A is a little ugly and has a break failure rate of one in two hundred thousand. Car B is much prettier and has a break failure rate of one in one million. Both cars have the same price. Which does a rational human choose. The answer is obvious. Any rational person would choose Car B because its is pretty and the brakes have a much lower chance of failing. So, you leave your house, walking, to head over to the dealership and purchase Car B. You are standing at a crosswalk. The light changes and you get the go ahead signal. As you are crossing the road you hear a loud screech about 20 feet to your right. You snap your head around to find an exact model of Car B hurtling towards you. The brakes are squealing but the car does not seem to be stopping. The car stays on its current path and smashes into the person who walked just in front of you. After you tell the police what happened, you find out that what went wrong was what you had feared. Brake failure. It’s a one in one million chance, but it happened right in front of you. So, what do you do now? Do you head down to the dealership and buy Car B? Of course not. You just saw its brakes fail and kill someone. However, this is not a rational decision.You have not gained any new information. You just happened to see the one in one million that had brake failure. You are still statistically much safer in Car B than A.
By Socrates’ definition a rational person always do what he or she judges to be best and never knowingly do what is wrong. You know Car B is safer than Car A (assume the numbers are accurate), so nothing should change your rational decision to purchase car B. Socrates also thought that wrong doing was caused by ignorance or insanity. Neither of which apply here.
Socrates had a good point or a good idea about how we work, but he seems to be over looking something.
There was another philosopher, much later, named Hume who had an idea of what Socrates was missing. Hume was of the mind that reason was the slave of desire. He thought that human desire ultimately controlled our actions. A definition for desire is “the feeling that accompanies an unsatisfied state”.
So, lets say that the reason you did not buy Car B was that you had a feeling of being unsatisfied by the state of almost being crushed to a pulp. Hume appears to be right in the case. Desire rules reason. But this isn’t always true. It is very convenient when desire and reason go hand in hand, but I’d say it’s also very rare.
I’m going to throw a crazy study at you and try to make you see it as legitimate even though I’ve forgotten the name of the man who conducted it. So, let’s call him doctor McCoy. Dr. McCoy did a study on happiness. Yes, happiness. I think that’s the thing we have when we do not desire anything. We are satisfied when we do not desire. So, that is certainly close enough to happy. Anyway, Dr. McCoy does a study where people state things that they believe will make them happy, and then they get them, in one way or another. Dr. McCoy waits a certain interval of time, then asks the person how much happier they are now that they have the thing that they desired. Dr. McCoy finds the shocking result that the participants were pretty bad at making themselves happy. What they thought they wanted didn’t last. It made them happy for a time, but faded.
What does this say about the nature of humans? They are driven by desires that cannot fulfill them. That does not sound very rational. Desires aren’t usually rational anyway. Does that mean that rational life is really the way to go? Even if you feel unfulfilled?
If you follow your own desires, will you every truly be happy for life?
Socrates followed the idea that you should go through life examining it rationally. He thought it best to take on the task of, first, knowing what is generally good or valuable in life. Then, such a person who has understanding of goodness and value may then come to know what is best to do or how to live so as to optimize the value in their own life.
This means that one should come to know their environment (Society) and find what is generally good and valuable. Look around the world today at different cultures. See the common threads in all of their value systems. Learn as much as you can about what the general good and valuable is, and then you may come to know the best way to live your life. Socrates would have you define yourself through society.
This could be a great way to define yourself, if it were entirely possible. Is it possible to let desire go completely to the wind? Or will you have a mix of actions, some rational, some just based on a perceived need of the moment, that prevent you from being as one sided as Socrates thinks you should be.
I believe the answer to be yes. We can do all we want rationally, but there will always be the desirous decisions as well. There is one big one, especially, that I see.
Love.
Such a cute word. Is that what is valuable in life? Most valuable? Can you rationally bring yourself to love another person? Can you rationally take on the endeavor of knowing another as well as you know yourself? Especially when you can’t truly know yourself without a large amount of work.
Or, do we just desire love? A rational person can still be lead by bad information, and thus, do things that aren’t rational. What information do you have about love that would make you rationally decide that it is worth seeking? Could it be just a desire driven by some uneasiness that we cannot define? It seems easy to attribute that to love, because of all the stories we’ve heard. And, considering we don’t seem to know how to make ourselves happy, what makes love the right answer?
I ask all these questions because they are questions that I have, and that I roll over in my mind frequently.
The shaky Dr. McCoy is not my only source for the idea that we, as humans, suck at making ourselves happy. I also have Radiohead and Sophocles.
“And just when you’ve found it, it’s gone.
And just when you feel it, you don’t.
You’ve gone off the rails.”
Thom Yorke howls that and it gives me goose bumps and me think at the same time (an interesting reaction. Here, we have an example of the fickle human condition. He’s hinting at the same displeasure with fulfilling ones desires as Dr. McCoy discovered in his study. You must be crazy to think that you can make yourself happy through desire. That’s the last line says to me.
“She kisses you with tongues and pulls you to the floor.
Don’t go you’ll only want to come back again.”
Desire is bad and puts us in a loop of the same actions. This blocks out our ability to gain more knowledge. If we can’t gain more knowledge, we are limited in our rational decisions. Physical pleasure is just a distraction? I don’t know about that. I’m really projecting now. Let’s get to Sophocles.
“Count no man happy until he dies, free of pain at last.”
This is the last line of his famous play “Oedipus the King”. I’m going to consider it outside the context of the play because I think it was meant to hold that duality of meaning in the play and outside, like many texts do. Its simple really, life seems to only be suffering, and the absence of suffering. The only way Sophocles saw to be truly happy was to know that you would never again suffer. Death. The end of any possible suffering. That must be happiness. Nirvana?
I don’t think, however, that this line was meant, at all, to endorse or encourage death in any way, it is merely a statement on the human condition. We hope and we worry. We smile and we frown. We fly and we crash. I couldn’t think of the opposite of pain. I don’t think its healing. The point is that this is another example of the seeming frivolousness of the pursuit of happiness.
I can’t really say that I think the pursuit of such a thing is frivolous. With out that pursuit what would we have? A rational life? Could we see things clearly and know how to truly live with out it? Socrates thought so. However, I can’t see a way to avoid it altogether. Acknowledging it is a big step. We need to know what we do to change. I just don’t have the information to know what is absolutely right for me. I hope that by exploring all these questions further I will someday know. However, I doubt it.
The only thing I really know is that I don’t know.
We are humans and we do what we do. I like to examine it. I have to change. I have to be different. Don’t I? If I don’t I don’t think I’d be me.
How am I not myself?
Let’s talk philosophy. Socrates. Socrates was an ancient Greek philosopher who had great impact on the thinkers of his time and our time. Near the end of his life, he was put on trial by the Athenian council for impiety (kind of like heresy) and corruption of youth (kind of like pee wee Herman). The story is that they were just jealous and wanted to see him dead because an oracle said that there were none wiser than he that were living. However, that’s not important. What is important (to me) is what he said in his own defense.
He proved the impiety charge to be bogus easily (I won’t go into it, read The Apology if you really want to know), but he had a bit more trouble with the corruption of youth charge. Socrates claimed that he could not have corrupted the youths because he was a rational person. He went further to say that all rational people seek value or what is good in their lives, and that they make decisions to attain these valuables. Therefore, if rational decisions only lead towards good, and he is rational, he couldn’t have done anything bad. He also said that, if he did corrupt the youths, then it was not his intention, but merely a flaw in his rationale. Something inside of him was messed up and needed to be mended if he were to go back to being a normal, rational being. He thought that he should then just be corrected by the state, rather than punished or killed, because he, like the rational people of the state, really wanted what was good.
He was then sentenced to death.
The real interesting thing about Socrates’ argument was the assertion that, at heart, humans are rational creatures. It’s a very complicated thing to think about. If we are rational, then we should always use the information we have to make the best decision possible. It is in this way that we gain value. It is in this way that we do good. But, are we really rational.
For example, lets say that you’ve saved up a few years and now finally have enough money to buy a new car. You do a lot of research because you value the money you’ve saved and you want to get the most valuable thing out of it. You’ve narrowed it down to two cars. Car A is a little ugly and has a break failure rate of one in two hundred thousand. Car B is much prettier and has a break failure rate of one in one million. Both cars have the same price. Which does a rational human choose. The answer is obvious. Any rational person would choose Car B because its is pretty and the brakes have a much lower chance of failing. So, you leave your house, walking, to head over to the dealership and purchase Car B. You are standing at a crosswalk. The light changes and you get the go ahead signal. As you are crossing the road you hear a loud screech about 20 feet to your right. You snap your head around to find an exact model of Car B hurtling towards you. The brakes are squealing but the car does not seem to be stopping. The car stays on its current path and smashes into the person who walked just in front of you. After you tell the police what happened, you find out that what went wrong was what you had feared. Brake failure. It’s a one in one million chance, but it happened right in front of you. So, what do you do now? Do you head down to the dealership and buy Car B? Of course not. You just saw its brakes fail and kill someone. However, this is not a rational decision.You have not gained any new information. You just happened to see the one in one million that had brake failure. You are still statistically much safer in Car B than A.
By Socrates’ definition a rational person always do what he or she judges to be best and never knowingly do what is wrong. You know Car B is safer than Car A (assume the numbers are accurate), so nothing should change your rational decision to purchase car B. Socrates also thought that wrong doing was caused by ignorance or insanity. Neither of which apply here.
Socrates had a good point or a good idea about how we work, but he seems to be over looking something.
There was another philosopher, much later, named Hume who had an idea of what Socrates was missing. Hume was of the mind that reason was the slave of desire. He thought that human desire ultimately controlled our actions. A definition for desire is “the feeling that accompanies an unsatisfied state”.
So, lets say that the reason you did not buy Car B was that you had a feeling of being unsatisfied by the state of almost being crushed to a pulp. Hume appears to be right in the case. Desire rules reason. But this isn’t always true. It is very convenient when desire and reason go hand in hand, but I’d say it’s also very rare.
I’m going to throw a crazy study at you and try to make you see it as legitimate even though I’ve forgotten the name of the man who conducted it. So, let’s call him doctor McCoy. Dr. McCoy did a study on happiness. Yes, happiness. I think that’s the thing we have when we do not desire anything. We are satisfied when we do not desire. So, that is certainly close enough to happy. Anyway, Dr. McCoy does a study where people state things that they believe will make them happy, and then they get them, in one way or another. Dr. McCoy waits a certain interval of time, then asks the person how much happier they are now that they have the thing that they desired. Dr. McCoy finds the shocking result that the participants were pretty bad at making themselves happy. What they thought they wanted didn’t last. It made them happy for a time, but faded.
What does this say about the nature of humans? They are driven by desires that cannot fulfill them. That does not sound very rational. Desires aren’t usually rational anyway. Does that mean that rational life is really the way to go? Even if you feel unfulfilled?
If you follow your own desires, will you every truly be happy for life?
Socrates followed the idea that you should go through life examining it rationally. He thought it best to take on the task of, first, knowing what is generally good or valuable in life. Then, such a person who has understanding of goodness and value may then come to know what is best to do or how to live so as to optimize the value in their own life.
This means that one should come to know their environment (Society) and find what is generally good and valuable. Look around the world today at different cultures. See the common threads in all of their value systems. Learn as much as you can about what the general good and valuable is, and then you may come to know the best way to live your life. Socrates would have you define yourself through society.
This could be a great way to define yourself, if it were entirely possible. Is it possible to let desire go completely to the wind? Or will you have a mix of actions, some rational, some just based on a perceived need of the moment, that prevent you from being as one sided as Socrates thinks you should be.
I believe the answer to be yes. We can do all we want rationally, but there will always be the desirous decisions as well. There is one big one, especially, that I see.
Love.
Such a cute word. Is that what is valuable in life? Most valuable? Can you rationally bring yourself to love another person? Can you rationally take on the endeavor of knowing another as well as you know yourself? Especially when you can’t truly know yourself without a large amount of work.
Or, do we just desire love? A rational person can still be lead by bad information, and thus, do things that aren’t rational. What information do you have about love that would make you rationally decide that it is worth seeking? Could it be just a desire driven by some uneasiness that we cannot define? It seems easy to attribute that to love, because of all the stories we’ve heard. And, considering we don’t seem to know how to make ourselves happy, what makes love the right answer?
I ask all these questions because they are questions that I have, and that I roll over in my mind frequently.
The shaky Dr. McCoy is not my only source for the idea that we, as humans, suck at making ourselves happy. I also have Radiohead and Sophocles.
“And just when you’ve found it, it’s gone.
And just when you feel it, you don’t.
You’ve gone off the rails.”
Thom Yorke howls that and it gives me goose bumps and me think at the same time (an interesting reaction. Here, we have an example of the fickle human condition. He’s hinting at the same displeasure with fulfilling ones desires as Dr. McCoy discovered in his study. You must be crazy to think that you can make yourself happy through desire. That’s the last line says to me.
“She kisses you with tongues and pulls you to the floor.
Don’t go you’ll only want to come back again.”
Desire is bad and puts us in a loop of the same actions. This blocks out our ability to gain more knowledge. If we can’t gain more knowledge, we are limited in our rational decisions. Physical pleasure is just a distraction? I don’t know about that. I’m really projecting now. Let’s get to Sophocles.
“Count no man happy until he dies, free of pain at last.”
This is the last line of his famous play “Oedipus the King”. I’m going to consider it outside the context of the play because I think it was meant to hold that duality of meaning in the play and outside, like many texts do. Its simple really, life seems to only be suffering, and the absence of suffering. The only way Sophocles saw to be truly happy was to know that you would never again suffer. Death. The end of any possible suffering. That must be happiness. Nirvana?
I don’t think, however, that this line was meant, at all, to endorse or encourage death in any way, it is merely a statement on the human condition. We hope and we worry. We smile and we frown. We fly and we crash. I couldn’t think of the opposite of pain. I don’t think its healing. The point is that this is another example of the seeming frivolousness of the pursuit of happiness.
I can’t really say that I think the pursuit of such a thing is frivolous. With out that pursuit what would we have? A rational life? Could we see things clearly and know how to truly live with out it? Socrates thought so. However, I can’t see a way to avoid it altogether. Acknowledging it is a big step. We need to know what we do to change. I just don’t have the information to know what is absolutely right for me. I hope that by exploring all these questions further I will someday know. However, I doubt it.
The only thing I really know is that I don’t know.
We are humans and we do what we do. I like to examine it. I have to change. I have to be different. Don’t I? If I don’t I don’t think I’d be me.
How am I not myself?