Happiness: If You’re Not Feeling it You’re Committing a Crime Against Yourself

In these secular days most of us accept we haven’t got an afterlife to look forward too, and most of us don’t hold the belief that we are going to come back in another form. In short this is the only chance we have to be happy, and since this is the only shot we’ve got we owe it to ourselves to make sure we are happy, and so we feel that any time spent suffering is time we have failed to utilise. This is the conclusion the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner came to in his book Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to be Happy in 2001 (although it has been in the news recently as it has just been made accessible to the English speaking world thanks to a new translation of the work by Steven Rendall).

Do you really want to live forever?: The Science of Immortality

The immortality of the soul has been on the philosophical agenda arguably since day one. On the scientific agenda, however, it registers fairly low down. Until now, that is. In his new book, The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death, political philosopher John Gray explores the history of scientific attempts to prove the existence of, and to even achieve, immortality. A history, it seems, that is more rich and contemporary than one might at first expect of the traditionally pragmatic and non-metaphysical subject.

In a lengthy article for the Guardian, Gray gives a summary of some of the more eyebrow raising events which go to make up this particular part of the history of science. The first is the reaction of post-Darwinian scientists, who for one reason or another felt compelled to respond to the anti-spiritualist worldview that Darwin’s work entailed. They did so by meticulously examining thousands of automatic-writing scripts – a popular phenomena in 19th century clairvoyance whereby the medium channels a spirit in such a way that a message from beyond can be written out – in search for evidence that might suggest their authenticity, such as information about the purportedly channeled spirit that would otherwise be unknown to the medium, or the occurrence of “cross-overs”, where separate mediums appear to be channelling the same thing independently of each other.

Well-being and the end of life

Atul Gawande’s article on end-of-life care in this week’s New Yorker is heart-breaking and thought-provoking.  At bottom, it’s an article about well-being, and how easy it is to lose track of what matters to us.  Here’s the basic idea:

People have concerns besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars. The hard question we face, then, is not how we can afford this system’s expense. It is how we can build a health-care system that will actually help dying patients achieve what’s most important to them at the end of their lives.

Gawande gives us a series of real-life illustrations.  Here’s one:

Susan Block and her father had the conversation that we all need to have when the chemotherapy stops working, when we start needing oxygen at home, when we face high-risk surgery, when the liver failure keeps progressing, when we become unable to dress ourselves. I’ve heard Swedish doctors call it a “breakpoint discussion,” a systematic series of conversations to sort out when they need to switch from fighting for time to fighting for the other things that people value—being with family or traveling or enjoying chocolate ice cream.

I wonder how much this is just a period of adjustment that will be solved by time.  Even 20 years ago, “fighting to the end” meant something different, because the weapons we were fighting with were different.  It’s only been the current elderly generation that has had to often, almost as a matter of routine, face the possibility of forgoing all these other values (family, touch, awareness, etc) in favor of more time with a machine-assisted pulse.  I don’t think many people who watch one of these bad deaths come away wanting the same thing for themselves.  And so I think, by the time the next generation starts facing the end of life, our values will be more sanely balanced, and we’ll stop using length of life as an easily measured proxy for well-being.  I hope!

I suppose the pessimistic view is that we’ve shown ourselves nearly incapable of letting go of easily quantified proxies for well-being.  There was a time when wealth was a decent proxy for well-being.  (The time when most people were below whatever threshold of income is necessary for a reasonable degree of self-determination.)  But now that nearly everyone in the developed world is well above that threshold, money is no longer a good proxy for well-being.  And yet many people continue to pursue money at clear cost to their own well-being.  Maybe we’ll be similarly foolish when it comes to death, continuing to pursue the maximally long life even at clear cost to our own well-being.

Related articles:

Well-Being: Psychological Research for Philosophers
By Valerie Tiberius, University of Minnesota (Vol. 1, September 2006)
Philosophy Compass

Welfarism
By Simon Keller , University of Melbourne (Vol. 3, December 2008)
Philosophy Compass

In Defence of Babel

Recently, BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme asked the question: What is lost when a language dies? This question is prompted by the prediction of an (un-named) US linguist that by the year 2100 90% of the world’s 7,000 currently spoken languages will be dead. The progressive march of dominant languages such as English is held to account for such changes in the world’s linguistic geography. Languages, like species, can now be listed as ‘endangered’: US organisation Ethnologue suggests that there are 473 such languages in the present day. Furthermore, it is suggested that 133 of the world’s languages now have less than 10 speakers.

The question, however, is should we care, and if so, why?

Freedom from DNA

What if you could know when and how you were going to die? Would you choose to remain ignorant, or would you prefer to confront the facticity of your own mortality directly? This question has engaged philosophers for millennia. Until recently, the question was merely a matter for personal speculation, eliciting intuitions about mortality, self-determination, and free-will. This has all changed. At least, so it seems.

A new industry has emerged, as a result of the last decade’s exponential technological advances in the field of bioinformatics. Now, a glimpse of our most likely personal Reaper is less than 100 dollars away (just two years ago the glimpse was ten times the distance and ten times more blurry). Gene sequencing companies have sprung up everywhere, like mushrooms after a rain. For a modest price, each of us can have our DNA analyzed, and receive a report of our personal predisposition to acquire a variety of potentially debilitating or terminal diseases. Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, lung cancer, breast cancer, obesity, and multiple sclerosis are but a few of the many worrisome conditions targeted by such DNA analysis.

The war on death

The NYT reports on the latest incremental advances in the science of lengthening the human lifespan. Maybe someday soon we’ll conquer senescence; maybe eventually we’ll even be able to live forever. But after you’ve lived long enough, wouldn’t continued existence get a little boring?