Raisin a hedonist

Like most people with children, I want my child to be happy. Of course, being a hedonist, I think it would be great if all people could be as happy as possible, but I’ve got a particular interest in this one. That is: I want his experiences to be mostly positive. I don’t want him to get everything that he wants, because, like his dad and most other people, he is likely to sometimes want stupid things. I don’t want him never to be sad or disappointed, because those things seem essential to learning to cope, and learning to cope seems to be essential to becoming a happy person. (Of course, could it be done without the sadness or disappointment, that would be preferable, and perhaps some die-hard optimists are like that. It’s just important that one nevertheless learns to understand sadness and disappointment, to be able to recognize it in others).

Being brought up by a hedonist is probably not as immediatly and obviously fun as you might imagine.

Here come the raisins: Most toddlers like raisins. Eating them, as well as handling them, is clearly pleasant. So, being a hedonist, and wanting my son to have pleasant experiences, it seems obvious that I should feed him raisins. And so I did.

But raisins are an option now. The hedonic adaptation is extremely quick in these kind of cases. A few raisins in and he is eating them in the kind of semi-consciuos way the American Stereotype eats pop-corn while watching a movie. Suddenly, not eating raisins right now is unpleasant, and totally out of proportion to how pleasant it was to eat them earlier. The net gain of introducing a new, but finite, source of pleasure may actually be in the negative.

To paraphrase Nietzsche (is it?): if there are raisins, how could I live with not eating raisins?

Reaction speaks louder than words

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but someone apparently tried to make a religious/political point by blowing up car and self nearby a busy street in the city where we live. Presumably, the intention was to kill others to, but fortunately,that didn’t go so well. Presumably, the intention was also to inspire others to do similar things, but that seems unlikely to happen. If anything, the likely outcome, the one we need to make sure becomes the actual outcome, is a near universal condemnation of the act and of the somehow moral sentiment and moral reasoning that seem to have brought it about. This needs to, and it seems that it will, come from all ”sides”.

Thus far fairly direct, no? What’s peculiar is that almost everything I read about this event, and virtually everything that’s recommended on twitter and facebook and the like, are texts about reactions to it, rather than actual reactions. We’re all at least second-order now. Someone tries to kill people on the main street in the city where we live, and the knee-jerk reaction is to go online and find out what the New York Times make of it. The reactions are the news. Just like reports on the students protests in Britain outnumber reports on what they’re protesting about. Or reports on how that favorite footballer of ours is doing is outnumbered by reports on what the Italian newspapers say about how he is doing.

Reactions are more important than the events themselves. This is no complaint. In fact, I think it’s basically a correct and sound priority. First-hand knowledge is a beautiful thing but in almost any event, it’s more important how others react to it. Because the importance of the event, almost any event, depends on, and consists in, how people react to it. If people die in an attack, that’s terrible but people die all the time: what we must live with is their absence (but most of us did that anyway), but, more importantly: with how people react to it. Whether it changes their risk assessments and perceptions of certain groups, certain areas. Whether it influences their behavior. Whether or not it is the thing people talk about when they meet. I remember not reacting very strongly to the first reports of 9/11, but was made to realize it’s importance by the sheer amount of coverage.

And sure, part of this obsession is this anxious little country’s pride over making the international news, and shame and regret over not being able to be used as the good example any longer.

Obviously, one of the most important things to assess is whether this event makes it more, or possibly less, likely to happen again. If fear is warrented, it must be because we have good reason to believe that it’s more likely. Perhaps it’s more likely than we believed it to be before, even if it is less likely than it actually was before. It is as if we think that this person broke a tabu, and believe that others like him will think that it’s now ”OK”. It’s not, obviously. And if a point was made by that person, there is now less point for someone else to make the same point.

While it is important, as I say, to condemn this sort of act and the sort of moral reasoning that inspired it in direct and no uncertain terms, it is also important to understand what the point was, and where the reasoning went wrong. It’s easy and somehow comforting to chalk it up to madness (it makes it less likely to happen again, if there is no ”reliable” mechanism by which the action is motivated), but then we pass an opportunity to understand and prevent these things happening.

Mongrel origins

Ideally, perhaps, any book, paper or conversation dealing with the Origins of Morality should have a lengthy section called ”the Origins of WHAT!?” in it. It’s just that then nothing else gets written, and that would be a shame, wouldn’t it? Or is that precisely what the protectionist philosophers hope for? Conceptual Analysis as a form of filibustering, perhaps.

The Science of Sleep

Background

A few years back when, driving my supervisors to despair, I suddenly became interested in everything, I did some semi-serious reading about sleep. Sleep, it turned out, is poorly understood. There are a lot of theories, but nothing much solid, about the function of sleep and how that function is carried out. Memories are consolidated during sleep, that much seems clear, meaning that if you’re in an information-heavy line of work, taking the occasional nap is probably a good idea. The need for sleep seems obvious. Of course we need to ”recover”. We get tired in the same sense that we get hungry, i.e. via a bodily feeling that reminds us that something needs to be done. But this ”of course” carries little actual content. WHY do we need to sleep? What is this recovering all about? And could it be done in another way? If it is something that needs to be replenished, couldn’t this be done artificially, and quicker?

During the more intense period of writing in my life, I’ve been nearly angry with the need to sleep. Don’t get me wrong: I love sleeping. That is, I love the fringe bits of it. The beginning and the end, basically. The unconscious part, I could do without (or could I? That’s what I want to find out).

Sure, there is something, well, relaxing about the fact that everyone powers down for 6-8 hours a day. I guess it keeps the general pace down and that, at least, seems sort of desirable. But some more thorough counter-factual thinking needs to be done about what would happen if we got rid of the need to sleep. The necessity of shelter would probably be less of an issue, for instance, which would make more diverse lifestyles possible. Having a home, and a fixed address, would become (more) optional. Society would crumble, or flourish, or both.

To the point

Having been a practicing parent for almost a year now, sleep – and the lack of it – has once again become a central topic. Why does the baby refuse to sleep for more than an hour, and what should we do to make things better? There are recommendations and, as so often in this neck of the woods, the recommendations are contradictory. Don’t pick the baby up. Do pick the baby up. Comfort. Don’t comfort. You’ll make the baby insecure if you don’t. You’ll make the baby dependent if you do. And so on. In the advice literature, almost regardless of the topic, there is a gap between what science says and what the experience of experienced parents tells. The situation is not made better by the fact that the science in this domain is, like its main subject matter, in its infancy. And even if the science of sleep where in a better state, it’s not always the case that understanding a phenomena leads to a way of coping with it.

Sleeping babies are, in two distinct ways, just barely the domain of psychology. First: sleeping is, mostly, an unconscious process. It’s as much a matter for physiology, neurology, biology and chemistry, as it is for psychology. Second: babies are in the process of becoming fit subjects for (folk) psychology proper. We don’t quite get them, since our reasons for poor sleep (chili eaten late, result of funding application due tomorrow) are not theirs. Nevertheless, the interaction we have with our kids is very much a psychological affair, and its almost impossible not to psychologize the explanations we use in such interactions. We even do it with computers, for crying out loud.

The contradictory advice currently given is that it is important with habits: the same procedure every night. But also: you must experiment with conditions, to find what’s right for you and your baby. As luck would have it, I’ve got a few months to figure it out.