
Imagining Life as a Stack of Mental States - _o-O-o_
http://onelobotomyplease.com/imagining-life-as-a-stack-of-mental-states/
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mr_toad
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introspection_illusion](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introspection_illusion)

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jazz_singh
I'm personally pretty riveted by this article -- it seems to translate the
beneficial mental health activity of tracking your emotional progression over
time (which lots of cool, useful mental health apps and startups allow users
to do now, and this genre of hack is one of the most common at mental health
hackathons) to an entirely different perspective on how to view human
existence.

I wonder what the trade-offs of adopting this perspective are. On the one
hand, we'd become more attuned to our emotional states, and mental health
would presumably be positively affected; but on the other hand, in creating a
society that relates every single venture and activity and thought process
back to the end goal of how the individual feels about it, aren't we making
people a lot more selfish?

Maybe this perspective in combination with a healthy sense of altruism,
ethics, vision / dreams / ambitions, etc., might be a neat way to view the
world. Or maybe a lot of us already view the world a lot like this,
subconsciously.

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lcuff
> aren't we making people a lot more selfish?

It depends. When I dug deep, I realized that I get a lot of pleasure out of
being a good guy: I currently mentor a kid (and have been doing so for 10
years). Very satisfying. A really shallow analysis might make it a case for
using drugs.

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suyash
Very interesting take on looking at life activities. I find the concept of
mental states not new but more or less happening at sub-conscious level. The
example the author gives of making a decision about going to a music festival
or not based on the emotions vs planning an activity, happens automatically
and almost instantly so that way it's nothing new and our brain already does
that, however deliberately analyzing one's day or week using this metaphor can
bring about interesting insights.

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winchling
Yeah but there's more to mental states than how they make us _feel_. They have
content and meaning. Which may affect subsequent and contingent feelings, for
example.

 _> Our outdated brains are built to handle the realities of ancient
societies. Our brain is supposed to be really good at certain things like
escaping a lion attack, finding a mate, or sharing a common meal._

So, in discovering the laws of thermodynamics, evolution and quantum theory,
which our brains presumably weren't designed for, we were just being lucky?
When will this luck run out, exactly, and how?

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coldtea
> _So, in discovering the laws of thermodynamics, evolution and quantum
> theory, which our brains presumably weren 't designed for, we were just
> being lucky?_

No, it was using a tool evolved over million years for something else, and
very good at that something else (that it can even do it instinctively), to do
another task.

And that task only 1 in millions of us can do (how many "discovered the laws
of thermodynamics, evolution and quantum theory"?) that have uniquely smart
brains, and that even them had to undergo years and years of training to
perform them.

Case in point, billions of people can predict where a baseball would fall
instinctively, thanks to their brain's evolutionary capabilities, without
solving the physics equations. But to do it with solving the equations takes
years of training.

Even in Einstein or Feynman or whatever, their basic evolutionary capacities
and instincts (hunger, anger, lust, fight or flight, etc) would trump their
physics prowess anytime...

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winchling
Nah, learning where a ball will land takes years of training too.

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coldtea
People can trivially estimate it by looking at the curve without knowing the
equations. And all kinds of animals do it to catch things we throw.

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winchling
How long does it take children to learn to catch?

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callesgg

        Every action, activity, hobby, or ritual is nothing more than the pursuit of a certain mental state.

I would much rather change that to

    
    
        "Every action, activity, hobby, or ritual can be accurately described as the pursuit of a certain mental state."
    

Saying that something is nothing more than one thing is never ever true.

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krick
I guess that's pretty much the core point the author is trying to make, and
your interpretation loses it. Like, it points out, that while I'm typing this
comment it is going to change the state of the HN DB and maybe transfer some
information to you and etcetera, but also I may feel differently after it's
done. The author rather suggests the point of view that all these things don't
really matter and the only thing that this comment is (from the personal
standpoint) is an attempt to make me feel like I'm socializing...

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barrkel
It's overly reductive. Why not take drugs and cut out the middleman - the
action? Why not become a brain in a vat and be fed sensations by some
stimulation device?

There's a lot of existing philosophy in this area, worth reading if one is so
inclined.

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krick
Well, I'm not the author, so it isn't me who you should ask, but I guess,
again, that that's entirely the point: there is no such a "why not". Except
that you are saying that as if it's something you can actually do. But in
reality you have neither the supply of all the necessary drugs to make you
feel what you are trying to feel, much less the "some stimulation device" to
make this all happen.

Otherwise, that's precisely what you'd do, despite you saying the contrary.

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barrkel
> But in reality you have neither the supply of all the necessary drugs to
> make you feel what you are trying to feel

Plenty of people find and use drugs to improve what they're feeling, and
they're reasonably successful at it, from the inside, from their own
perspective.

> Otherwise, that's precisely what you'd do, despite you saying the contrary.

No, it's not, and it's not what most people would do, for reasons too long to
get into here. Like I said, there's a lot of literature here. Most people have
pretty strong beliefs that they would rather suffer in a real world than have
a satisfied fake life with managed feelings. It's only when the pain is too
much that they fall back to alternatives.

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viklove
> Most people have pretty strong beliefs that they would rather suffer in a
> real world than have a satisfied fake life with managed feelings. It's only
> when the pain is too much that they fall back to alternatives.

Right, but you're still just trying to achieve some mental state. It's just
that that mental state is impossible to reach through drugs/simulation alone.

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callesgg
One point here beeing that to reach a mental state you might have to not
trying to be reaching that mental state but trying for the actual activity.

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nudpiedo
"Every action, activity, hobby, or ritual is nothing more than the pursuit of
a certain mental state."

In other words: determinism. The philosophy opposed to "free will."

That is the same as saying: humans are goal directed animals, etc. Even when
they are not aware of it. It's interesting as a working framework for habit
makers etc.

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eveningcoffee
I do not think that it is describing determinism. I am not sure how you did
come to this conclusion. Perhaps you can elaborate more deeply?

I think that this piece extends our control over our free will (i.e. gives us
more free will) because it helps us to see and understand our inner state more
clearly.

But I think that strictly following it can also be limiting because it will
leave out unexpected outcomes. For example you may not go to see some
concert/play etc because you have estimated how it would affect your mental
state and have decided it to be not worthwhile. Perhaps it would have been a
ground breaking experience you could not have ever imagined.

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nudpiedo
For me it is the clear message of the post: humans do not have free will but
obey to a set of rules which happen to be a "stack of mental states" ergo
humans are deterministic (implicit conclusion).

These mental states are described in previous literature. I also didn't study
philosophy long enough to have a lengthy debate, but I can identify the topic
and the argument.

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jeromebaek
Classically reductionist, and completely incorrect. If I like my blanket-tea-
kindle-bed ritual, it's _because I like my blanket-tea-kindle-bed ritual_.
It's not reducible to anything else.

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Rainymood
>If I like my blanket-tea-kindle-bed ritual, it's because I like my blanket-
tea-kindle-bed ritual.

But why stop there? What you are saying now feels (to me) much like circular
reasoning: I like X because I like X. But _why_ do you like X? I also like to
lie in my blanket and read with a cup of tea _because_ : it is comfortable, it
is safe, it is stimulating for the mind ... so I urge you to think _why_ do
you like your ritual

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callesgg
There is never a clear answer to why something is the way it is. The answer
depends on the context in which you ask the question.

Which context is best to use is impossible to answer. You don't know all the
contexts.

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mwgkgk
Inspecting mental state data may yield strategic insight, however optimizing
strategy for positive mental states I don't think is a viable suggestion Mars-
colonization-wise.

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snickmy
For front end developers, this is basically redux @ react

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anoncake
Stop messing with scrolling.

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tghouht
I believe that “mental state” is a misnomer. While trying to rewrite this
articles main points on my own, I constantly felt my explanations getting
mucked up by the phrase. I eventually opted to use “emotional state” in its
place, and will be doing so likewise for the rest of my comment.

1\. The opening note leads me to an important point: emotions =/= mental
state. They are certainly a part of it, but they are not the whole.

Suppose, for instance, that you've been forced to stay up later than usual the
past few days, and haven't gotten enough rest. Maybe you've only had five, six
hours a night. we'll say. All other things being equal, the day after this
streak of less-than-okay sleep, I anticipate that you'd find yourself working
less than stellarly.

This has just about nothing to do with emotion. It has everything to do with
your brain not getting all that it needs to function acceptably. Just replace
“sleep” with “food” or “sex/human contact” and the idea would hold.

If the hardware isn’t running that well, I’d darn well say that regardless of
how happy you might be on that day, your “mental state” is probably still
below average.

To take the metaphor further: No matter how happy the IQ 70 child is about
having received lots of chocolate on a particular day, one can’t really call
her mental state a good one.

That is why I would’ve used “emotional state” in this writer’s place.

2\. I’m going to point out that “mental states” are - for some people, yes -
the end goal. That is not true for all people. This seems patently obvious to
me.

Take anyone who donates large fractions of their incomes to charity. Their
cutesy emotional state week-charts would be full of frowny faces! Sporadically
(whenever they would do their donations), they would be happy, but that is not
what they care about! That is not how this kind of person would evaluate their
life! They would evaluate it by how much impact they had on the world, not by
their happiness.

Though, for most people, sure, happiness is a pretty good measure of how well
your life has been going.

3\. I feel as though the super zoomed out looks at emotional states over the
course of years is a little silly. The average of years worth of emotion… it
just doesn’t seem to me like you could extract all that much out of the
information, even if you did have a pretty good record (like a journal or
something.)

Like, ideally, you’ll want to evaluate your emotional (and overall mental)
state regularly so you can pivot towards better states as quickly as possible.
You don’t, I don’t know, wait ‘till the end of each month to look back on your
records and then decide what to do when you could’ve just looked at a week’s
worth of data and come to the same conclusion. You wouldn’t wait a year to
change when you could’ve made the same change with a month’s worth of info,
yeah? Sure, go ahead and what the forest is to make sure that it’s not burning
down, but you could probably just look at the trees in front of you to find
that out instead.

4\. Can I say, I just really like those drawings, they’re very cute and cool.
The building blocks of each person’s life in the “Expanding the Metaphor”
section was especially cool.

\---------------------------

Actionability-wise, keeping records of how well you were thinking and what you
were feeling on a particular day is definitely useful information to keep.

