Arthur’s advice: comparing Arthur Schopenhauer’s advice on happiness with contemporary research

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) is well known for his pessimism. He did not believe in real happiness. In his view, the best a person can achieve is to reduce misery. At the end of his career, he wrote a book on how to live the most bearable life. This is a practical guide based on his personal experiences and illustrated by quotations from other thinkers subscribing to his views. In this paper, we summarize his recommendations and compare these with conditions for happiness as observed in present day empirical research. Little of the advice appears to fit current research on conditions for happiness. Following Schopenhauer’s advice would probably make us unhappier, even if we had the same neurotic personality.

Do careers officers give good advice?

The National Survey of Health and Development is a longitudinal study of 5,362 young people born in the first week of March 1946 and living throughout Britain. 90% of the 15-year-old school-leavers in the sample were recommended by the Youth Employment Service to take up a particular sort of work. Survey members who followed this advice stayed longer in their first job than young people who took up some other work. Evidence is presented which suggests that this better performance results not from the personality of the young people who accepted advice nor from the superior types of first job they entered, but from the accurate assessment by the careers officer of their abilities and interests.     

Should I give advice? A systemic view

Giving advice is considered from i he viewpoint of Milan systemic family therapy, and the possibility of its always being a therapeutic error is discussed. The beliefs of both professionals and clients concerning advice are examined. What can systemic therapists do if families ask for advice, and when is direct advice useful? Effects on therapists and families of giving advice are discussed as well as ways of limiting possible damage to the process of therapy. Questioning techniques are considered as an alternative that allows families to discover their own solutions.     

New age advice: ticket to happiness?

The ‘New Age’ movement emerged in the second half of the 20th century and New Age ideas became the vogue in the Western world. New Age is much concerned with personal quality of life and offers both a philosophy of life and various therapeutic practices, presumed to raise happiness. This paper first describes the main recommendations to be found in New Age books. Next it considers the probable effects on happiness of these, by examining both the theoretical plausibility and the empirical conditions of happiness. This paper concludes that several recommendations are likely to produce beneficial consequences. It is argued, however, that the advice will not fit everybody equally well and that some New Age practices may reduce happiness, e.g., practices that undermine a realistic outlook on reality.     

What types of advice do decision-makers prefer?

In the decision-making literature, “advice” has typically been defined very restrictively, as a recommendation concerning which alternative the decision-maker should choose. The present paper examines decision-makers’ reactions to this and three additional types of advice (a recommendation concerning which alternative not to choose, information about alternatives, and a recommendation concerning how to make the decision), along with another common form of interpersonal assistance (Social Support), from the perspective of maximizing decision accuracy and maintaining decision autonomy. The role of situational and individual differences is also examined. Results from two multilevel policy-capturing studies indicate that, although they consider recommendations regarding which alternative to choose to be important in some contexts, decision-makers often prefer to receive a type of advice that is greatly understudied by researchers—namely, the provision of information about alternatives. The implications of these findings for the study of advice-taking are discussed, as are future research directions.     

Must we measure what we mean?

This paper excavates a debate concerning the claims of ordinary language philosophers that took place during the middle of the last century. The debate centers on the status of statements about ‘what we say’. On one side of the debate, critics of ordinary language philosophy argued that statements about ‘what we say’ should be evaluated as empirical observations about how people do in fact speak, on a par with claims made in the language sciences. By that standard, ordinary language philosophers were not entitled to the claims that they made about what we would say about various topics. On the other side of the debate, defenders of the methods of ordinary language philosophy sought to explain how philosophers can be entitled to statements about what we would say without engaging in extensive observations of how people do in fact use language. In this paper, I defend the idea that entitlement to claims about what we say can be had in a way that doesn’t require empirical observation, and I argue that ordinary language philosophers are (at least sometimes) engaged in a different project than linguists or empirically minded philosophers of language, which is subject to different conditions of success.     

Receiving other people’s advice: Influence and benefit

Seeking advice is a basic practice in making real life decisions. Until recently, however, little attention has been given to it in either empirical studies or theories of decision making. The studies reported here investigate the influence of advice on judgment and the consequences of advice use for judgment accuracy. Respondents were asked to provide final judgments on the basis of their initial opinions and advice presented to them. The respondents’ weighting policies were inferred. Analysis of the these policies show that (a) the respondents tended to place a higher weight on their own opinion than on the advisor’s opinion (the self/other effect); (b) more knowledgeable individuals discounted the advice more; (c) the weight of advice decreased as its distance from the initial opinion increased; and (d) the use of advice improved accuracy significantly, though not optimally. A theoretical framework is introduced which draws in part on insights from the study of attitude change to explain the influence of advice. Finally the usefulness of advice for improving judgment accuracy is considered.     

Are we born and do we die?

The stranglehold on our imagination by the mind-body dualisms that permeate the culture is such that most people seem to suppose that "body" and "soul" name distinct and separable entities. Resisting such dualisms in favour of an old-fashioned Aristotelean view of the soul as the form of the body, this essay considers two questions: do human parents produce human beings, and do human beings die? The doctrine of the special creation of the individual soul seems to require us to answer the first question in the negative because, according to this doctrine, parents only produce matter for the God-given soul to form. As to the second, many people seem to suppose that human beings do not die, only their bodies do. Arguing against the view that immortality is a natural property of human minds, the essay suggests (with the help of Joseph Ratzinger) that, whether we speak of "immortality" or of "resurrection", life from death is neither nature, nor achievement, but gift.     

Do we conceptualize every color we consciously discriminate?

Mandik understands color-consciousness conceptualism to be the view that one deploys in a conscious qualitative state concepts for every color consciously discriminated by that state. Some argue that the experimental evidence that we can consciously discriminate barely distinct hues that are presented together but cannot do so when those hues are presented in short succession suggests that we can consciously discriminate colors that we do not conceptualize. Mandik maintains, however, that this evidence is consistent with our deploying a variety of nondemonstrative concepts for those colors and so does not pose a threat to conceptualism. But even if Mandik has shown that we deploy such concepts in these experimental conditions, there are cases of conscious states that discriminate colors but do not involve concepts of those colors. Mandik's arguments sustain only a theory in the vicinity of conceptualism: The view that we possess concepts for every color we can discriminate consciously, but need not deploy those concepts in every conscious act of color discrimination.     

Are we free to imagine what we choose?

It has long been recognized that we have a great deal of freedom to imagine what we choose. This paper explores a thesis—what we call “intentionalism (about the imagination)”—that provides a way of making this evident (if vague) truism precise. According to intentionalism, the contents of your imaginings are simply determined by whatever contents you intend to imagine. Thus, for example, when you visualize a building and intend it to be of King’s College rather than a replica of the college you have imagined the former rather than the latter because you intended to imagine King’s College. This is so even if the visual image you conjure up equally resembles either. This paper proposes two kinds of counterexamples to intentionalism and discusses their significance. In particular, it sketches a positive account of how many sensory imaginings get to be about what they are about, which explains how the causal history of our mental imagery can prevent us from succeeding in imagining what we intended.

     

How do we know that we are unique?

This paper aims to examine the notion of uniqueness as one aspect of the self that is taken for granted in psychotherapy. This paper attempts to address the question 'how do we know that we are unique individuals?' and in so doing, points out some difficulties. One plausible, but not problem-free answer is the notion of privileged access. Some of the problems will be briefly outlined.     

If we compute faster, do we understand better?

Practitioners of cognitive science, “theoretical” neuroscience, and psychology have made less use of high-performance computing for testing theories than have those in many other areas of science. Why is this? In high-performance scientific computation, potentially billions of operations must lead to a trustable conclusion. Technical problems with the stability of algorithms aside, this requirement also places extremely rigorous constraints on the accuracy of the underlying theory. For example, electromagnetic interactions seem to hold accurately from atomic to galactic scales. Large-scale computations using elementary principles are possible and useful. Many have commented that the behavioral and neural sciences are largely pretheoretical. One consequence is that we cannot trust our few theories to scale well for a very good reason: They don’t. We have some quite good computational theories for single neurons and some large-scale aspects of behavior seem to be surprisingly lawful. However, we have little idea about how to go from the behavior of a single neuron to the behavior of the 10¹¹ neurons involved when the brain actually does something. Neural networks have offered one potential way to leap this enormous gap in scale, since many elementary units cooperate in a neural network computation. As currently formulated, however, neural networks seem to lack essential mechanisms that are required for flexible control of the computation, and they also neglect structure at intermediate scales of organization. We will present some speculations related to controllability and scaling in neural networks.     

Consciousness and identity: who do we think we are?

This article proposes that the epistemological concerns raised by the inherent incoherence of thought requires a dialogical approach to understanding consciousness and identity. It is argued that such an approach leads to (a) a fundamentally spiritual view of self, (b) a radical view of consciousness as a non-local field that shapes the limits of our perception, and (c) a determination of the degree of gap between reality and thought's representation of it. A method of measuring this kind of consciousness is examined, and examples of insights gained through this methodology are provided. Implications of this perspective are explored, and conclusions arising from this inquiry are presented.     

Why we don’t deserve credit for everything we know

A view of knowledge—what I call the Deserving Credit View of Knowledge(DCVK)—found in much of the recent epistemological literature, particularly among so-called virtue epistemologists, centres around the thesis that knowledge is something for which a subject deserves credit. Indeed, this is said to be the central difference between those true beliefs that qualify as knowledge and those that are true merely by luck—the former, unlike the latter, are achievements of the subject and are thereby creditable to her. Moreover, it is often further noted that deserving credit is what explains the additional value that knowledge has over merely lucky true belief. In this paper, I argue that the general conception of knowledge found in the DCVK is fundamentally incorrect. In particular, I show that deserving credit cannot be what distinguishes knowledge from merely lucky true belief since knowledge is not something for which a subject always deserves credit.     

Ancient Chinese philosophical advice: can it help us find happiness today?

Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism are three main classic Chinese philosophy schools, which all deal with the question of how one should live. In this paper, we first review these ancient recommendations and next consider whether they promise a happy life in present-day society. Recommended behaviours found in the ancient texts are compared with conditions for happiness as observed in present-day empirical investigations. Classic Confucianism appears to offer the most apt advice for finding happiness in present-day society, in particular because it recommends that one should be involved in real life. Classic Taoist advice is second best: its strong point is that it advises us against too much social conformism and bookishness. The advice given by classic Buddhists is better not followed in modern society.