How would you calibrate a brain scan machine to happiness except by comparing it to self-evaluated happiness? You only know that certain neural pathways correspond to happiness because people report being happy while these pathways are activated. If someone had different brain circuitry (like, say, someone born with only half a brain), you wouldn’t be able to use this metric except by first seeing how their brain pattern corresponded to their self-reported happiness. It seems to me that happiness simply is the perception of happiness. There is no difference between “believing you’re happy” and “being happy.” You can’t be secretly happy or unhappy and not know it, ’cause that wouldn’t constitute happiness.
It’s hard to be mistaken about how happy you are at the precise moment you’re asked the question (you might have trouble reporting exactly how happy you are, but that’s different). However, if you want to know how happy you’ve been over the past month, for example, it’s possible to be wrong about that; you could be selectively remembering times you were more or less happy than average.
True. Still, the method of measuring serotonin and dopamine levels would offer no benefit over a self-evaluation, since you can’t implement it retroactively.
Only retroactively. Our memories are easy to corrupt. But no, I don’t think you can be happy or unhappy at any given moment and simultaneously believe the opposite is true. There’s probably room for the whole “belief in belief” thing here, though. That is, you could want to believe you’re happy when you’re not, and could maybe even convince yourself that you had convinced yourself that you were happy, but I don’t think you’d actually believe it.
You haven’t given any evidence for those claims. At one time it was believed that minds were indestructible, atomic entities, but now we know we have billions of neurons there is plenty of scope for one neuronal cohort to believe or feel things that another does not.
Sure, that’s true. I suppose you could have a split-brain person who is happy in one hemisphere and not in the other, or some such type of situation. I guess it just depends on what you’re looking for when you ask “is someone happy?” If you want a subjective feeling, then self-report data will be reliable. If you’re looking for specific physiological states or such, then self-report data may not be necessary, and may even contradict your findings. But it seems suspect to me that you would call it happiness if it did not correspond to a subjective feeling of happiness.
“believing you’re happy” and “in fact happy” strike me as distinctions without distinction. How are they falsifiable?
By comparing a written self-evaluation and serotonin and dopamine levels in ones brain, perhaps?
How would you calibrate a brain scan machine to happiness except by comparing it to self-evaluated happiness? You only know that certain neural pathways correspond to happiness because people report being happy while these pathways are activated. If someone had different brain circuitry (like, say, someone born with only half a brain), you wouldn’t be able to use this metric except by first seeing how their brain pattern corresponded to their self-reported happiness. It seems to me that happiness simply is the perception of happiness. There is no difference between “believing you’re happy” and “being happy.” You can’t be secretly happy or unhappy and not know it, ’cause that wouldn’t constitute happiness.
It’s hard to be mistaken about how happy you are at the precise moment you’re asked the question (you might have trouble reporting exactly how happy you are, but that’s different). However, if you want to know how happy you’ve been over the past month, for example, it’s possible to be wrong about that; you could be selectively remembering times you were more or less happy than average.
True. Still, the method of measuring serotonin and dopamine levels would offer no benefit over a self-evaluation, since you can’t implement it retroactively.
There’s no self-deception, then?
Only retroactively. Our memories are easy to corrupt. But no, I don’t think you can be happy or unhappy at any given moment and simultaneously believe the opposite is true. There’s probably room for the whole “belief in belief” thing here, though. That is, you could want to believe you’re happy when you’re not, and could maybe even convince yourself that you had convinced yourself that you were happy, but I don’t think you’d actually believe it.
You haven’t given any evidence for those claims. At one time it was believed that minds were indestructible, atomic entities, but now we know we have billions of neurons there is plenty of scope for one neuronal cohort to believe or feel things that another does not.
Sure, that’s true. I suppose you could have a split-brain person who is happy in one hemisphere and not in the other, or some such type of situation. I guess it just depends on what you’re looking for when you ask “is someone happy?” If you want a subjective feeling, then self-report data will be reliable. If you’re looking for specific physiological states or such, then self-report data may not be necessary, and may even contradict your findings. But it seems suspect to me that you would call it happiness if it did not correspond to a subjective feeling of happiness.