TranshumanTech: [tt] NS 2850: Searching for the algorithm of ...

NS 2850: Searching for the algorithm of happiness
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328502.900-searching-for-the-algorithm-of-happiness.html

01 February 2012 by Liz Else

Book information

The Happiness of Pursuit: What neuroscience can teach us about the good
life by Shimon Edelman
Published by: Basic Books
Price: ?17.99/$25.99
See more: An illustrated version of this article will be published within
the next two weeks on our CultureLab books and arts blog

THIS may be a book's best ever summary of itself: "when fishing for
happiness, catch and release".

With a title that inverts one of the inalienable rights established by the
American Declaration of Independence, The Happiness of Pursuit is for fans
of enquiries into the nature of brain, mind - and happiness itself.

When the author Shimon Edelman was 8, he came upon Christopher Logue's
poem Epitaph, which asks: "What is the greatest happiness on earth?" The
poem was embedded in a story which turned on the possibility of writing a
happiness algorithm.

As a computer scientist and psychology professor, Edelman could not rest
until he had made the case for happiness to be given a scientific, perhaps
even algorithmic, explanation.

He begins this search with the observation that "the mind is inherently
and essentially a bundle of ongoing computations". Over two millennia, he
argues, we have come to realise that our notion of self is partly a
construct of those computations, and partly a distributed entity that he
believes is "best thought of as a network of cause and effect that
transcends the boundary between the individual and the environment, which
includes society and the material world". It's comforting to think that
our experiences can help us achieve the kind of gradual self-change that
might promote happiness.

In the end, Edelman does not deliver an algorithm for happiness, but
offers a happy addition to the classic recipe of "self-knowledge,
self-improvement, and, eventually, selfless conduct" - a coherent notion
of the self.

Source: http://stirling-westrup-tt.blogspot.com/2012/02/tt-ns-2850-searching-for-algorithm-of.html

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