LogFAQs > #956327309

adjl posted...

Consider the difference between eating stale bread and eating a slice of bread so fresh it's still slightly warm. Their ability to stave off hunger is identical, but the latter offers a positive experience that goes well beyond merely preventing hunger. Heck, consider dessert as a fundamental concept: That's food you're eating because it's fun to eat, not to sustain yourself (though the caloric content does help). Similarly, there's a world of difference between dealing with boredom by playing your favourite game and dealing with it by playing Solitaire or Minesweeper.

Again, there's a very substantial range of "good" beyond "this fixes that unpleasantness I felt." Happiness is intrinsically enjoyable.

If you don't care about any of the ways in which your life could be said to measurably suck, is there actually any reason to say that your life sucks? At its most basic definition, "harm" is simply "something I would prefer not to experience." Therefore, somebody who doesn't care enough to have a preference hasn't actually experienced harm. Insisting that they have and should therefore be miserable is profoundly arrogant.

Eating fresh bread is more rewarding than eating stale bread because the brain knows that the fresh bread is "better" in that it is less likely to have any complications like mold spores or being difficult to digest. Millions of years of evolution have given us a preference for fresh food for reasons like this, the intrinsic reward you speak of is just a bonus to try to help us avoid getting sick in addition to filling our stomachs. Dessert is the same, people might eat it "because it's fun" but the only reason it is fun is because the calorie count as you mention, such things would have helped stave off starvation and grant energy for other tasks to avoid the negative base line. It isn't intrinsically good, it's only felt as such because it has a purpose in helping avoid negativity, these days many people eat and overeat simply to stave off boredom. As for you game example, a preference for a certain game exists because of the type of negativity a person is trying to abate. Some love online games because it helps the avoid feeling lonely, some love competitive games because they want to "prove" they're better at a task than others to bolster their self esteem, some like story driven games for the escapism which let's them destress. All of these are about avoiding not just boredom but other negative which is why they are found to be more enjoyable for those people than something simple like solitaire.

I never actually said that ALL good in the world was about rising above the baseline negative, or fixing it as you put it. Quite a lot of it is about trying to maintain a position above it or at least not sink too low under the line. What I mean is that getting something like a raise at work is enjoyable not just because of the short term things like feeling appreciated but also the long term understanding that having more money will help one maintain their position relative to the line, also this is probably obvious but most of these feelings I've mentioned are on the subconscious or unconscious level so the most people sense on the surface is just happiness which is what you're getting at.

• Try thinking about it this way, why does anyone do ANYTHING? Hunger comes naturally without any action, we have to go out of our way to satisfy that hunger, every single thing we do is to satisfy some desire or another. Desires, wants, needs, deprivations, negativity in other words, that comes to us naturally. Many of these desires we can only partly satisfy if at all, plenty of people have starved to death after all, and of those who do get their daily bread, the need to empty their bowels will result soon after because of it. Even if we could somehow satisfy them all then we would be left with boredom yet another negative. Life is a trial of trying to avoid and reject the negativity inherent to it, but as with all human endeavors it can only be done imperfectly.

So say you have a beggar in some filthy slum in some war torn 3rd world country who is blind and missing both his legs but has been in his position for so long and so many of the people who have been around him his whole life are also in awful positions or even worse ones that he doesn't see his lot as particularly bad... you would say that he honestly wouldn't be better off with his sight, legs, and money?