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At 01:41 AM 8/29/2004 -0400, HowlBloom@aol.com wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>In a message dated 8/28/2004
11:53:55 PM Eastern Standard Time, BMC273 writes:<br>
<dl>
<dd><font size=2>Mike Levine had a great show on Suitcase Nuclear bombs
last Monday, did you catch it? I think he said OBL had purchased 40 of
these from Russia.</font><br><br>
</dl> <br>
hb: aha. so you missed my art bell show appearance saturday night
discussing islam's nuclear threats for three hours. i'd have liked
your opinion of it.<br>
<dl><font size=2><br><br>
<dd>As for the issue about who suffers more...men or women, my friend had
a good point - she said its true we all suffer as humans but dont the
POOR suffer more than the RICH? So there are differences...(I still think
she is right that women do suffer more then men in general). What do you
think?</font><br><br>
</dl>hb: in his Progress Paradox, Glenn Eastbrook sums up the literature
on happiness and comes to the conclusion that no matter how rich you get,
you still manage to fill some internally driven quota of discontent and
misery. I believe that Timothy Wilson in his book on the adaptive
subconscious also shows a lot of evidence that we have an internal
set-point for misery that manufactures miseries when we're in clover and
manufactures blessings when we are truly laid low.<br>
</blockquote><br><br>
There are very serious methodological problems (and even ethical or
philosophical problems)<br>
in how one measures or compares "happiness." <br><br>
I am reminded of (another) Estabrook(s), who wrote a couple of books on
hypnotism that<br>
I found very interesting back in the early 60's. So far as I can tell,
there are a lot<br>
of acclaimed experts on the subject around who do not know many of the
important things he had<br>
found out 'way back then. <br><br>
I remember, in particular, some curves describing how something like 95
percent of pain is <br>
"in the mind" -- is a secondary response based on what really
amounts to fear. <br>
A lot of what this Estabrook is tracking may be in that
category.<br><br>
Certainly, in intelligent systems, there are some very fundamental
mechanisms<br>
which tend to "normalize" fluctuations in happiness...<br>
similar to the act of scaling variables to unit variance. It is
interesting to<br>
ask what this really means.<br><br>
Part of what happens is a kind of dangerously off-course behavior, as
people<br>
magnify the importance of small things, when they (1) do not experience
enough<br>
variance in their lives; and (2) they are not "large-souled"
enough to see<br>
beyond the immediate direct personal experience in their own
lives.<br><br>
But... the realities of the human brain do deviate a bit from the
simplest <br>
rational models here. Many people do live for years in dark and lonely
lives<br>
where foods seem to lose their flavor and images their color... there are
some<br>
chronic mean calibration effects.<br><br>
And also... many (not all) decisions we face today are not deep
problematic esthetic issues,<br>
but issues of survival or nonsurvival.<br><br>
I suppose that what to do about transhumanism and machine intelligence is
less<br>
trivial. For some reason, the second issue feels more real to
me.<br><br>
Best of luck,<br><br>
Paul<br>
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