文章探讨了内在幸福感对功利主义的影响。作者通过个人经历，如童年旅居、抑郁时期和使用情绪日记的体验，指出幸福感很大程度上受内部处理机制影响，例如如何回忆事件、回忆频率等。这使得基于预期幸福感做决策变得困难，因为需要考虑诸多未知因素。作者进一步思考是否应主动改善内部幸福感，如提升幸福感基线、认知行为疗法等。最后，作者提出关于幸福感、享乐主义的理解，以及是否高估了内在影响等问题，并引发对其他生物是否具有类似内在处理机制的思考。

🧠 幸福感受内在处理影响：作者通过自身经历说明，幸福感并非完全由外部事件决定，内在的记忆、回忆频率等内部处理过程也起着重要作用。

🤔 决策困难：由于幸福感受内在影响，基于预期幸福感做决策变得复杂，需要考虑诸多不确定因素，如幸福感基线、记忆偏差等。

💡 积极干预内部过程：作者认为应主动改善内部幸福感，例如提升幸福感基线、进行认知行为疗法等，这些干预可能比想象中更有效。

❓ 待解问题：文章最后提出，如何更好理解幸福感和享乐主义？是否高估了内在影响？以及其他生物是否也存在类似的内部处理机制？

Published on January 18, 2025 3:32 PM GMT

When learning about classic utilitarianism (approximately, the quest to maximize everyone's expected well-being), I struggle because much of my well-being seems internal. If happiness or misery are significantly influenced by our internal processing of events, then how does this affect utilitarianism and its practical application?

I'll start with a few examples:

When I was a child, my family moved to a tropical country. I had some health problems due to the tropical climate. Fortunately, as an adult, I remember almost none of them, and instead have mostly positive memories about the time abroad. I occasionally remember them, which makes me feel happy.I have been through some stressful times and depressive episodes in my life. This made me seek therapy and encouraged me to learn mindfulness techniques. Overall, these had positive effects on my life, and I now look back at the depressive episodes as challenges that made me grow stronger.I have an app that I use to keep a mood diary. It has a "memories" feature that displays random entries from the past. I like this feature. Sometimes, it causes me to remember a past happy day, and I feel some new happiness as I think back.

In all these examples, the overall happiness derived from an event contains large contributions from internal processes: whether I remember the event in a positive or negative light, how often I think back to it, etc. This has a few implications for my behavior as an aspiring utilitarian:

It is difficult to base decisions on expected happiness. For example, was it a good decision for my parents to move abroad? If I were to have different memories from my time abroad, would this change the value of the decision? To estimate a decision's expected value, one would need to factor in unknowns such as the affected persons' happiness set-point, the parts they might remember (e.g., peak-end bias), or whether their diary app would randomly select the corresponding memory and show it again.

I recognize that these internal processes are second-order effects. To a first approximation, positive experiences will cause positive memories, and vice versa. However, my personal examples above show that this is not always the case. Are there situations where we should risk bad experiences, in the expectation that good may come from them?

Given that some of my well-being is internal, I wonder if I ought (in the ethical/utilitarian sense) to do more to improve these internal processes. Interventions like trying to increase my happiness set-point, doing cognitive behavioral therapy, reframing my memories of past events, cultivating gratitude, etc., might have a larger effect than I realize.

This is all still fairly unclear to me, so I decided to write it down, and would love to receive thoughts of the community. Some particular questions:

How could I better understand well-being, hedonism, and related concepts?Am I overestimating these second-order effects of an experience on happiness?Have you ever tried to directly affect your internal happiness? How? With what result?(somewhat tangential) Do we know whether other sentient beings also have such strong internal processes, or whether this is a human thing? Does this affect how hedonists think about the welfare capacity of animals?

Discuss