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The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life.
And that one thing is getting genes into the next generation.
What’s fundamental to the Buddha’s teachings is the general dynamic of being powerfully drawn to sensory pleasure that winds up being fleeting at best.
We spend our time looking for the next gratifying thing—the next powdered-sugar doughnut, the next sexual encounter, the next status-enhancing promotion, the next online purchase.
So true
the overestimation of how much happiness they’ll bring.
ennui
it would seem that, as time passed, there was more in the way of anticipating the pleasure that would come from the sweetness, yet less in the way of pleasure actually coming from the sweetness.I,†
Interesting on there is more pleasure from anticipating rather than actually having it
knowing the truth about your
situation, at least in the form that evolutionary psychology provides it, doesn’t necessarily make your life any better.
In other words, now you see that it’s a treadmill, a treadmill specifically designed to keep you running, often without really getting anywhere—yet you keep running!
“Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions
and the discomfort of being ruled by them.”
had both the discomfort of being aware of my mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.
This is something that can happen again and again via meditation: accepting, even embracing, an unpleasant feeling can give you a critical distance from it that winds up diminishing the unpleasantness.
Feelings are designed to encode judgments about things in our environment.
Very nice idea of what is feeling
This is a reminder that natural selection didn’t design your mind to see the world clearly; it designed your mind to have perceptions and beliefs that would help take care of your genes.
In a way feelings existed just to help us to pass on genes
So the feeling lasts longer than is likely to be of any practical value.
Our feelings weren’t designed to depict reality accurately even in our “natural” environment.
The fact that we’re not living in a “natural” environment makes our feelings even less reliable guides to reality.
Underlying it all is the happiness delusion.
“The cost of survival of the lineage may be a lifetime of discomfort.”
cicadas,
The first is impermanence.
The second mark of existence is dukkha—
the third mark of existence, “not-self,”
anatta,
Discourse on the Not-Self,
discourse
affliction,”
Engagement is the product of a “lust,” as the Buddha puts it, that people have for the aggregates; there is a clinging to them, a possessive relationship to them. In other words, the “engagement” persists so long as the person fails to realize that the aggregates are “not-self.”
And this experiment suggests a different scenario: the actual brain machinery that translates incentive into motivation is the same regardless of whether you’re consciously aware of the incentive and consciously experiencing the translation; so maybe the conscious awareness doesn’t really add anything to the process.
The researchers concluded that the brain was initiating the action before the person became aware of “deciding” to initiate it.
coalescing.
And we remember positive experiences in greater detail than negative experiences, as if the positive events are specially primed for sharing with the public in rich detail.
One is about the nature of the conscious self, which we see as more in control of things than it actually is. The other illusion is about exactly what kind of people we are—namely, capable and upstanding. You might call these two misconceptions the illusion about our selves and the illusion about ourselves.
“It is possible to argue that the primary evolutionary function of the self is to be the organ of impression management (rather than, as our folk psychology would have it, a decision-maker).”
Indeed, you may find it useful to think of meditation as a process that takes a conscious mind that gets to do a little nudging and turns it into something that can do a lot of nudging—maybe even turns it into something more like a president than a speaker of the House. And you may, to that end, find it useful to understand how the brain determines which module is in charge at any given moment.
the activation of modules is closely associated with feelings.
the idea of nonattachment to feelings and the idea of not-self.
Observing feelings without attachment is the way you keep modules from seizing control of your consciousness.
The Experience of Insight,
“imagine that every thought that’s arising in your mind is coming from the person next to you.”
the conscious self doesn’t create thoughts; it receives them.
propellant,
Feelings are, among other things, your brain’s way of labeling the importance of thoughts, and importance (in natural selection’s somewhat crude sense of the term) determines which thoughts enter consciousness.
nucleus accumbens,
“There were certain systems in your head that were designed to be motivated to eat high-calorie foods, and those systems had certain kinds of motives or beliefs or representations, and there are other systems in your head that have motivations associated with long-term health, and those systems have certain beliefs about the chocolate.” In the end, modules of the second kind, modules focused on the long term,
You might ask, What exactly do we mean by “stronger”? Well, if Hume was right, and the drift of that shopping experiment was right, it comes down to a contest of feelings.
carry the day,
dalliance.
