But I can’t find any comment of yours in the spam or in moderation.

Succh an account would address Jason’s astounding claim that about the bits that were moulded by past environmental influences which you all approve of versus the ‘evil’ bits from the current environment which you all want to excise? Who makes the call? On what basis? My view? We can’t draw a clear distinction.

An objective account hold that too much of some things –smoking, cocaine, junk food, alcohol— can stunt our potential and make us sick.Though these things may give us pleasure they do not constitute a good life.

I’ve explored an objective account by looking at Ronald Dworkin’s argument here that most people would accept that happiness would involve living good lives.

From reading the linked article I can see that the text is very Kantian in terms of its assumptions and understandings of knowledge: ie. we cannot know the world as it is; the order that is found in our experiences is constructed by our minds; it is impossible to to have a complete knowledge of the world; all knowedge is partial and immanent because the mind is seeking to make sense of a reality of which it is a part; the mind is engaged in a continuous process of classification and reclassifications of experiences; the complexity of our classifications increase as human beings learn new ways of understanding and ordering their experiences.

I’m sympathetic to a lot of this —’tis far sophisticated than the crude empiricism that floats around Australian culture. My main line of criticism is that there is too much emphasis on ‘mind’ as opposed to ‘bodies’ in this text. I much prefer approaching ‘experience’ in terms of ‘embodied subjectivity’ or the ‘body subject’.I would argue that the main strand of the philosophical tradition (and cognitivism in psychology) overlook the centrality of the body in human experience.

For Merleau-Ponty, bodies have their worlds and understand their worlds (eg., the world of the bushman is different from the inner city professional). The shift being made here (an important one) is to argue that consciousness—or mind– does not direct the body’s movements; these are directed instead by the intelligent body’s connections with the world at hand. It is the body, not an occupying consciousness, which understands its world and it does so in terms of a tacit knowledge.

This may obtuse but it is important for understanding what Hamilton is talking about re happiness. A lot advertising talks to our bodies not just our minds. We understand the world of advertising we are embedded in in terms of our embodied subjectivity and tacit understandings. We kinda know what’s going on don’t we.

Let’s see if it can get through as an embedded link here

Incidentally I tried to add a link to my comment on this twice which was to a paper on free will but it got swallowed by the spaminator.

So silly old Aristotle, who has been rendered useless by Darwin, has some staying power in these neo-liberal times. A distinction can be drawn between rock formations and organic individuals. There is no need to talk about divine essence.So stop indulging in inventions.

is not neoclassical economics. it’s just a rough paraphasal of what neuroscience tells us about this elusive ’self’ and ‘consciousness’. Call it metaphysics if you wish.

I notice that none of you have still not addressed my points – what is it that is so great about this arbitrary cutoff point between the genetically determined ’self’ plus the bits that were moulded by past environmental influences which you all approve of versus the ‘evil’ bits from the current environment which you all want to excise? Who makes the call? On what basis? My view? We can’t draw a clear distinction. Of course our culture and social environment and material environment influences our self and vice versa. Of course our cultural and social environments are just composed of other selves whose bundles of nerves fire in almost exactly the same way as each other and spin webs of meanings which change the way other brains fire and so on. And So what of it? The notion of some wise entity transcending all this is just disguised theism.

And Gary, ’self organisation’ is also found in the economy and the climate and our ecosystems and in rock formations. that doesn’t breathe a divine essence into any of these. Your distinction between the ‘organic’ and the ‘mechanistic’ is long outdated. Inanimate objects can also be ‘organic’ in the sense you use the term. I’m aware of the Aristotelian heritage. So what? 99% of philosophy has been rendered useless by Darwin thereon.

Aristotle’s conception of ‘happiness’ (a utilitarian category) is the good life which can be interpreted as a flourishing life well lived. That is an objective conception—what is good for the organism— and not the subjective one of the utilitarians—happiness according to my individual preferences or desires.

Aristotle operates with an organic conception of human nature—as distinct from the mechanistic conception of the utilitarians—and he holds that human beings are self-organizing and so are different from watches.

The talk about essences in Aristotle refers to what makes a thing or entity what it is as distinct from some other thing. So some hold that blond hair or a penis is not a what characterises the difference between a human being and stone. It is more likely to be rationality or language use.

Aristotle was reworked by Hegel and Marx in terms of essences and appearnces in that a thing can appear to be ‘x’ but is actually ‘z’ —(eg.,a market society appears to a collection of free individuals acting in terms of self interest but is essentially structured by power relations) whilst holding to the objectivity of appearances.(They are just as real as the power relations). Platonism (appearances are illusions) has been dumped.

It is interesting the way that Jason swears away about metaphysicians when he is doing metaphysics himself—eg., “the environmental component of your feedback-response mechanisms that cull and hone your neural machinery and help form your current ’self’?” Aristotle (and Hegel & Marx for that matter) –would have understood such Jason talk as metaphysics, which is understood to the basic categories that we deploy in science, religion, commonsense etc —in this case we are being offered an account of the metaphysics of neo-classical economics.

The upshot of this is that Hamilton’s talk about a true self and spirit is a distorted interpretation of Aristotle.

Caw blimey Jase, what a bloomy mouthful! I think you’re saying something simple but in such an utterly complicated, obfusucatory way. Perhaps to dazzle us with the brilliance of your mind?

There can be no doubt Jason, you are very intelligent and don’t need to prove it by saying simple things in a complicated way. (Commonly known of as being a wanker). Academe is full of them, but I guess everyone here fully realises that, so no need to remind everyone.

Life is not only about having intelligence. One day you may learn that you have emotions too and that these are actually far more powerful than your mere thoughts. Your emotions will confound you intellectually every time. Get used to them, get to know them and then you might be closer to conceding that you possibly have a soul. You cannot rely solely on your mind to get you through, else you live in fear and loathing of the more powerful aspect of your being. Living in your head alone will lead only to your abnormal development incompleteness, horrible unhappiness and you may have to hang yourself. Are you having any problems with your neck?

I cannot find the religious claptrap in my previous comment, would you be so kind as to point it out to me?

If Daniel Gilbert is right, then you are wrong. That is to say, if Daniel Gilbert is right, then you are wrong to believe that a new car will make you as happy as you imagine. You are wrong to believe that a new kitchen will make you happy for as long as you imagine. You are wrong to think that you will be more unhappy with a big single setback (a broken wrist, a broken heart) than with a lesser chronic one (a trick knee, a tense marriage). You are wrong to assume that job failure will be crushing. You are wrong to expect that a death in the family will leave you bereft for year upon year, forever and ever. You are even wrong to reckon that a cheeseburger you order in a restaurant — this week, next week, a year from now, it doesn’t really matter when — will definitely hit the spot. That’s because when it comes to predicting exactly how you will feel in the future, you are most likely wrong…

Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, has been studying the gap between how people expect they are going to feel about some future event, and how they end up actually feeling:

Gilbert and his collaborator Tim Wilson call the gap between what we predict and what we ultimately experience the ”impact bias” — ”impact” meaning the errors we make in estimating both the intensity and duration of our emotions and ”bias” our tendency to err. The phrase characterizes how we experience the dimming excitement over not just a BMW but also over any object or event that we presume will make us happy. Would a 20 percent raise or winning the lottery result in a contented life? You may predict it will, but almost surely it won’t turn out that way. And a new plasma television? You may have high hopes, but the impact bias suggests that it will almost certainly be less cool, and in a shorter time, than you imagine. Worse, Gilbert has noted that these mistakes of expectation can lead directly to mistakes in choosing what we think will give us pleasure. He calls this ”miswanting.”

It is inevitable that the more affluent life becomes, and the more good things there are that we can want and subsequently acquire, the more disappointed we will be.

Once income reaches a point where we are adequately housed and fed, all the rest offers potential for disappointment.

The converse can also be true. According to results released by the World Values Survey in 2003, Nigeria was the country with the highest percentage of happy people, followed by Mexico, Venezuela and El Salvador.

The archetypal Gilbertian personality is Eeyore in A.A.Milne’s Christopher Robin books. He is consistently disappointed by life, but somehow manages to weather small catastrophes, as happened on his birthday

And BTW I don’t think that hack Murray can reasonably be described as any sort of a libertarian, atypical or otherwise.