it’s only a problem if you insist on reality doing things the way you want them.
I agree that this is common and pathological, but why do you think ALL unhappiness proceeds from it? There is a middle ground between dispassionate judgment and desperate craving.
Not really: there are two utility systems, not one. The absence of pleasure does NOT equal pain, nor vice versa. They are only weakly correlated, and functionally independent: they have different effects on the brain and body. And we can have mixed feelings, because both systems can activate at the same time.
But there’s no inherent reason why activating the pain system is required in the absence of any given form of pleasure, or else we’d be mind-bendingly unhappy most of the time. MOST pleasant things, in fact, we are happy about the presence of, but not necessarily unhappy at the absence of.
As for the question about “all”, please give me an example of a form of unhappiness that does NOT derive from a conflict between your desires, and the current state of reality. ;-)
I agree with your first two paragraphs, but fail to see the relevance.
I must be matching cliches myself. I interpreted “you insist on reality doing things the way you want them” as referring to, as I said, pathological craving—a subset of “a conflict between your desires, and the current state of reality”. I can’t think of any unhappiness that has a reason other than that (although sometimes it has no apparent reason), but what of it? Having desires means having such a conflict (barring omnipotence or impossible luck).
My error, actually. I should have explained more clearly what I mean by “conflict”… I lapsed into a bit of a cliche there, undermining the point I was building up to from the first two paragraphs.
The key is conflict with the current state of reality, distinguished from future state. If you’re busy being mad at the current state, you’re probably not working as effectively on improving the future state. Negative motivation is primarily reactive, and past/present focused rather than active and present/future focused, the way positive motivation is.
A positively-motivated person is not in conflict with the current state of reality, just because he or she desires a different state. Whereas, someone with an emotion-backed “should”, is in conflict.
So my question is/was, can you give an example of active unhappiness that derives from anything other than an objection to the current state of reality?
You implied that there’s a “middle ground” between dispassionate judgment and desperate craving, but my entire point is that positives and negatives are NOT a continuum—they’re semi-independent axes.
Some researchers, btw, note that “affective synchrony” -- i.e., the correlation or lack thereof between the two—is different under conditions of stress and non-stress, and conditions of high pain or pleasure. High pain is much more likely to be associated with low pleasure, and vice versa for high pleasure. But the rest of the time, for most people, they show near-perfect asynchrony; i.e., they’re unrelated to each other.
Which means the “middle ground” you posit is actually an illusion. What happens is that your negative and positive evaluations mostly run in parallel, until and unless one system kicks into high gear.
You could compare it to a chess program’s tree-trimming: you’re cutting off subtrees based on negative evaluation, and more deeply investigating some, based on positive evaluations.
In the ancestral environment—especially our prehuman ancestry—this is effective, because negative branches equal death, and you don’t have a lot of time to make a choice.
But in humans, most of our negative branch trimming isn’t based on actual physical danger or negative consequences: it’s based on socially-learned, status-based, self-judgment. We trim the action trees, not because we’ll fall off a cliff, but because we’ll seem like a “bad” person in some way. And our reasoning is then motivated to cover up the trimmed branches, so nobody else will spot our concerns about them.
So the trimmed branches don’t show up in consciousness for long, if at all.
But, since the evaluation modes are semi-independent, we can also have a positive evaluation for the same (socially unacceptable) thought or action that we (for the moment) don’t act on.
So we then experience temptation and mixed feelings… and occasionally find ourselves “giving in”. (Especially if nobody’s around to “catch” us!)
So this dual-axis model is phenomenally better at explaining and predicting what people actually do, than the naive linear model is. (People who approach the linear model in reality, are about as rare as people who have strongly mixed feelings all the time, at least according to one study.)
The linear model, however, seems to be what evolution wants us to believe, because it suits our need for social and personal deception much better. Among other things, it lets us pretend that our lack of action means a virtuous lack of temptation, when in fact it may simply mean we’re really afraid of being discovered!
(whew, more fodder for my eventual post or series thereof!)
I don’t see how they’re even remotely unorthodox. Most of what I said is verifiable from your own personal experience.… unless you’re claiming that if having sex gives you pleasure, then you’re in constant pain when you’re not having sex!
However, if you must have the blessings of an authority (which I believe is what “orthodox” means), perhaps you’ll find these excerpts of interest:
In addition to behavioral data, evidence from the neurosciences is increasingly
in accord with the partial independence of positive and negative evaluative
mechanisms or systems (Berntson, Boysen & Cacioppo, in press; Gray, 1987, 1991). The notion dates back at least to the experimental studies of Olds (1958: Olds & Milner, 1954), who spearheaded a literature identifying separate neural
mechanisms to be related to the subjective states of pleasure and pain.
...
In an intriguing study that bears on functional rather than stochastic independence, Goldstein and Strube (in press) demonstrated the separability of positive and negative affect within a specific situation and time and the uncoupled activation of positive and negative processes after success and failure feedback, respectively.
The paper containing these two excerpts (from the 1994 APA Bulletin), is probably worth reading in more detail; you can find a copy here.
So, at least in what might be loosely considered “my” field, nothing I said in the post you’re referencing is exactly what I’d call “unorthodox”.
Given how little we are given to go on, evaluating the plausibility of a vaguely suggested hypothesis is hard work. One should only do it if one sufficiently expects it to lead to fruition, otherwise you can solve the riddles posed by the Oracle of White Noise till the end of time. Maybe a proper writeup in a separate post will do the trick.
I agree that this is common and pathological, but why do you think ALL unhappiness proceeds from it? There is a middle ground between dispassionate judgment and desperate craving.
Not really: there are two utility systems, not one. The absence of pleasure does NOT equal pain, nor vice versa. They are only weakly correlated, and functionally independent: they have different effects on the brain and body. And we can have mixed feelings, because both systems can activate at the same time.
But there’s no inherent reason why activating the pain system is required in the absence of any given form of pleasure, or else we’d be mind-bendingly unhappy most of the time. MOST pleasant things, in fact, we are happy about the presence of, but not necessarily unhappy at the absence of.
As for the question about “all”, please give me an example of a form of unhappiness that does NOT derive from a conflict between your desires, and the current state of reality. ;-)
I agree with your first two paragraphs, but fail to see the relevance.
I must be matching cliches myself. I interpreted “you insist on reality doing things the way you want them” as referring to, as I said, pathological craving—a subset of “a conflict between your desires, and the current state of reality”. I can’t think of any unhappiness that has a reason other than that (although sometimes it has no apparent reason), but what of it? Having desires means having such a conflict (barring omnipotence or impossible luck).
My error, actually. I should have explained more clearly what I mean by “conflict”… I lapsed into a bit of a cliche there, undermining the point I was building up to from the first two paragraphs.
The key is conflict with the current state of reality, distinguished from future state. If you’re busy being mad at the current state, you’re probably not working as effectively on improving the future state. Negative motivation is primarily reactive, and past/present focused rather than active and present/future focused, the way positive motivation is.
A positively-motivated person is not in conflict with the current state of reality, just because he or she desires a different state. Whereas, someone with an emotion-backed “should”, is in conflict.
So my question is/was, can you give an example of active unhappiness that derives from anything other than an objection to the current state of reality?
You implied that there’s a “middle ground” between dispassionate judgment and desperate craving, but my entire point is that positives and negatives are NOT a continuum—they’re semi-independent axes.
Some researchers, btw, note that “affective synchrony” -- i.e., the correlation or lack thereof between the two—is different under conditions of stress and non-stress, and conditions of high pain or pleasure. High pain is much more likely to be associated with low pleasure, and vice versa for high pleasure. But the rest of the time, for most people, they show near-perfect asynchrony; i.e., they’re unrelated to each other.
Which means the “middle ground” you posit is actually an illusion. What happens is that your negative and positive evaluations mostly run in parallel, until and unless one system kicks into high gear.
You could compare it to a chess program’s tree-trimming: you’re cutting off subtrees based on negative evaluation, and more deeply investigating some, based on positive evaluations.
In the ancestral environment—especially our prehuman ancestry—this is effective, because negative branches equal death, and you don’t have a lot of time to make a choice.
But in humans, most of our negative branch trimming isn’t based on actual physical danger or negative consequences: it’s based on socially-learned, status-based, self-judgment. We trim the action trees, not because we’ll fall off a cliff, but because we’ll seem like a “bad” person in some way. And our reasoning is then motivated to cover up the trimmed branches, so nobody else will spot our concerns about them.
So the trimmed branches don’t show up in consciousness for long, if at all.
But, since the evaluation modes are semi-independent, we can also have a positive evaluation for the same (socially unacceptable) thought or action that we (for the moment) don’t act on.
So we then experience temptation and mixed feelings… and occasionally find ourselves “giving in”. (Especially if nobody’s around to “catch” us!)
So this dual-axis model is phenomenally better at explaining and predicting what people actually do, than the naive linear model is. (People who approach the linear model in reality, are about as rare as people who have strongly mixed feelings all the time, at least according to one study.)
The linear model, however, seems to be what evolution wants us to believe, because it suits our need for social and personal deception much better. Among other things, it lets us pretend that our lack of action means a virtuous lack of temptation, when in fact it may simply mean we’re really afraid of being discovered!
(whew, more fodder for my eventual post or series thereof!)
pjeby:
You are professing these unorthodox claims instead of communicating them. Why should I listen to anything you say on this issue?
I don’t see how they’re even remotely unorthodox. Most of what I said is verifiable from your own personal experience.… unless you’re claiming that if having sex gives you pleasure, then you’re in constant pain when you’re not having sex!
However, if you must have the blessings of an authority (which I believe is what “orthodox” means), perhaps you’ll find these excerpts of interest:
...
The paper containing these two excerpts (from the 1994 APA Bulletin), is probably worth reading in more detail; you can find a copy here.
So, at least in what might be loosely considered “my” field, nothing I said in the post you’re referencing is exactly what I’d call “unorthodox”.
Now that the idea has been singled out in hypothesis space, you can evaluate its plausibility on your own, even without supporting argument.
I didn’t realize there was an orthodoxy saying that humans have one utility system.
Given how little we are given to go on, evaluating the plausibility of a vaguely suggested hypothesis is hard work. One should only do it if one sufficiently expects it to lead to fruition, otherwise you can solve the riddles posed by the Oracle of White Noise till the end of time. Maybe a proper writeup in a separate post will do the trick.