Categoría: Biases on Sentience
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The Interface Theory of Perception by Donald D. Hoffman
A goal of perception is to estimate true properties of the world. A goal of categorization is to classify its structure. Aeons of evolution have shaped our senses to this end. These three assumptions motivate much work on human perception. I here argue, on evolutionary grounds, that all three are false. Instead, our perceptions constitute…
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Does every experience have some negative valence?
Roger Thisdell holds that every experience has some negative valence and that there are no experiences with a positive hedonic level. There is a point where you deconstruct perception to basic experiences by not feeding certain mental processes with your attention, they fade out. If I’m not paying attention to thought, the experience and comprehension…
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In every country people think that others are less happy than they themselves say
In every country people think that others are less happy than they themselves say. In every single country, the average estimate of happiness is far lower than actual reported happiness. Every single country!… Read more
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Against Wishful Thinking by Brian Tomasik
Some people hold more hopeful beliefs about the world and the future than are justified. These include the feeling that life for wild animals isn’t so bad and the expectation that humanity’s future will reduce more suffering than it creates. By feeding these dreams, optimistic visions of suffering reduction, while noble, may in fact cause…
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The big lie
People wonder about the cause of poverty when scarcity is the natural state of things. Why is scarcity the natural state of things? Because we are “designed” (metaphorically) to survive and reproduce our genes as much as possible. Not to discover reality. Not to enjoy. This is why evolution has selected in us the fear…
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The “Eternal-Playlist” thought experiment
Privileged beings (students) of the privileged species (human) at privileged time (XXI c.) and privileged space (Germany) ranked only 30% of the recent experiences as «worth living». The “Eternal-Playlist” thought experiment, by Thomas Metzinger: «At Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, we began a first series of small pilot studies with a group of advanced philosophy…
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The Sad Truth About Happiness Scales: Empirical Results
«We replicate nine key results from the happiness literature: the Easterlin Paradox, the ‘U-shaped’ relation between happiness and age, the happiness trade-off between inflation and unemployment, cross-country comparisons of happiness, the impact of the Moving to Opportunity program on happiness, the impact of marriage and children on happiness, the ‘paradox’ of declining female happiness, and…
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A compass that is perpetually «stuck on South»
«If someone offered you a pill that would make you permanently happy, you would be well advised to run fast and run far. Emotion is a compass that tells us what to do, and a compass that is perpetually stuck on north is worthless.» —Professor Daniel Gilbert. Department of Psychology, Harvard University «Many millions of…
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Ideology of Reproduction versus Non-Suffering and conservatism vs progressivism
«While every sensitive being fundamentally wishes to avoid suffering and experience happiness, curiously, human societies have almost never made non-suffering and happiness their founding values. Why? The ideology of reproduction has existed for 100,000 years, while the belief that the spirit survives the death of the body appears. We must reproduce so that a progeny…
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The case of Dax Cowart
«I was burned so severely and in so much pain that I did not want to live even in the early moments following the explosion. A man who heard my shouts for help came running down the road, I asked him for a gun. He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Can’t you see I am a…