Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart Read online

  Many of us have used this method of “polling” others’ opinions when consulting the rating system for products on the online shopping website Amazon.com. These days, Amazon is more than just a bookseller. It’s a big-data platform, aggregating the experiences of others to help you determine if you might like a particular product. Enough positive testimonials can increase your confidence in a product you haven’t tried (“4.8 stars with 1,120 ratings? I’ll take it!”). But if there are only two or three ratings, you might question whether those people are a good match for your own preferences. Meanwhile, Amazon is busily looking at your purchase patterns, comparing them to millions of other people—and presenting you with a short list of things you might also like to buy. When done well, this is extremely helpful, saving time, frustration, and money.

  The social networking website Facebook.com provides another example of how we might learn from others about our own preferences and how we can gain confidence in which of our friends’ tastes match our own:

  “Hmm, my friend Tom liked the page for a new tech gadget. I should check it out—Tom and I have the same appreciation for new technology.”

  “Ellie likes a band called Rascal Flatts . . . but we almost never like the same music. I’m not going to pay much attention to her opinion on that.”

  In both cases, prior knowledge of past hits and misses by these “witnesses” allowed us to predict how well their suggestions, if followed, are likely to increase our own life-happiness.

  Predicting what we’ll like or dislike is complicated by conflicting choices. Let’s go back to our scenario about buying a home. Should you purchase the one with the big outdoor patio or the one with the surround-sound TV room? What if you really like relaxing outdoors, but you also like watching movies? Which preference should carry more weight? You might also be juggling conflicts between short-term and long-term outcomes. Should you buy now, or will you experience greater long-term happiness by renting now, saving your money for a down payment, and buying a bigger house later? Experiences help us learn which paths usually lead to greater happiness, which in turn help us develop a general understanding about our own preferences.

  Predicting how our actions today are likely to affect happiness down the road is a vital life skill. That’s why, when our motivations conflict, we can spend a lot of time contemplating how events are likely to play out, how other people will probably respond, or how we’re likely to feel in given situations.

  When you’re thinking about buying a home you also consider your desire not to be overburdened with a mortgage. You consider whether the home meets all of your requirements for size, features, and neighborhood. You estimate your income (as best you can) over the next thirty years and how stable your career is likely to be.

  Finally, after all this thought and conjecture, you arrive at a decision: you’ll buy the home. How did you finally decide? You weighed your various desires and how much happiness you expect each one to bring. You guessed how the various outcomes will affect you. And then, ultimately, you picked the one you thought would increase your life-happiness the most.

  From this example, consider how much rational thought is involved in how we make decisions. As we can see, it may be used to influence, change, or police our motivations by changing estimates of our future happiness. But rational thought by itself doesn’t compel action. It helps us figure out the likely outcomes and consequences of our desires, but a thought alone doesn’t motivate action. It’s the collision of thoughts and the desire for happiness that drives us to act.3

  Buying a home is a huge life decision, so despite any pacing real estate agent, your careful consideration of the matter is entirely justified. But do we use the same process of analysis for smaller decisions? Not quite. Say you walk into a restaurant in your new neighborhood to celebrate becoming a homeowner. Sitting at the table, your decision is now merely between ordering the river trout or the rib-eye steak. Meanwhile, your decision, let’s say, is complicated by your desire to keep your weight down and your cholesterol level low. The waiter’s pencil is tapping his order pad impatiently.

  You aren’t likely to agonize over a decision about ordering dinner quite as much as buying a home, but the underlying process is the same. In the end, you will choose the meal that you think will maximize your life-happiness.

  Perhaps you’ve done some research into the relationship between diet and cholesterol risk to help you determine what to eat. As a result, you no longer have to debate the overall strategy of what you consume every time you sit down for a meal. Rather, you now just follow the preferences and rules of thumb you’ve developed before. Every now and then you might revisit those preferences—after a visit to the doctor, perhaps, or after eating an amazingly tasty filet mignon—and adjust your preferences accordingly. But through all the twists and turns, you are always motivated by the desire to optimize your life-happiness.

  Let’s summarize:

  We use experience, rational thought, and interactions with others to form expectations about what will make us happy.

  Much of the rational thought involves speculating on the likely outcome of our actions.

  Combine these expectations with the motive for happiness, and we’re driven to action.

  With these insights we now have a more comprehensive answer to the main question of what motivates our behavior:

  Behavior is motivated by our beliefs about how best to increase our life-happiness, and these beliefs are based on our experiences in life.

  But isn’t the notion that we all try to maximize our life-happiness something impossible to prove? After all, we can’t read each other’s minds, so how can we ever really know what motivates someone else? If your life-happiness preferences are based on your own experiences and inclinations, and no one else can ever really get inside of your head, how can another person ever know for sure that you really are trying to increase your life-happiness?

  We can’t. But do we need to? The notion that all desires come from a fundamental desire for life-happiness doesn’t come from watching what other people do—it comes from thinking about our own behavior and motivations and from asking other people what drives their own decision-making in this area. If we each analyze the thoughts and desires in our heads when we’re choosing what to do, the motivation to aim for happiness is pretty clear.

  We can also come to believe, through observations in life and through the findings of science, that most of the basic workings of one human being are the same as any other human being, including the mechanisms of the brain. The “happiness chemicals” serotonin and dopamine aren’t reserved for a select group of people. Research has shown that these chemicals are an intrinsic aspect of moderating and controlling the human brain.4 As a popular nerdy T-shirt puts it succinctly, “Serotonin and dopamine: technically, the only things you enjoy.”

  If we believe our own behavior is motivated by the pursuit of life-happiness and our observations of other people’s behaviors confirm that they are doing the same, and if science validates the notion of happiness as a primary function of the brain, then we can reasonably say that most people are probably motivated by the pursuit of life-happiness.

  Do we always maximize our own life-happiness? Of course not. Millions of people choose to smoke cigarettes. People get into debt gambling. There’s a difference between trying to maximize our happiness and actually, successfully, doing it. We can be misled about what will give us the most happiness—by the addictive nicotine in cigarettes, for example, or by misunderstanding the odds of winning at the roulette wheel.

  Sometimes we simply guess wrong about how events will unfold, or even how we’ll feel in a given situation. Other times, we can be lazy and not take a moment to think things through. And, as we all know, we can also sometimes overestimate the likelihood of something happening or underestimate its impact on our emotions. It’s pretty difficult to predict the future, espec
ially when such predictions are over the extent of an entire lifetime.

  This doesn’t mean our motives aren’t based on maximizing our life-happiness. It just shows that we are human beings—and sometimes we make decisions that turn out badly in the long run.

  Where do emotions fit into our motivations? Many people think of emotions as something separate from the intellect. But in fact they are biologically linked. Emotions are, after all, a type of thought produced in the center region of the brain, mostly in the hippocampus and amygdala regions.5

  Recent research in neuroscience has shown that these regions of our brain are also involved in our reasoning and memory formation.6 That helps explain why we all (fortunately) have the ability to make quick decisions that seem instinctual—what we often call “gut feelings.” If you see someone being beaten mercilessly, you don’t have to sift through all the ramifications that have led you to oppose brutality before you feel anguish. You feel it immediately, seemingly unconsciously. And when something heavy comes flying at your head, you don’t calculate the relative densities of the object and your skull or the likely impact of a long hospital stay on your life-happiness. You duck.

  Some of these intuitions are innate or biological, like the fight-or-flight response to danger. But others emerge because of insights we gained from thoughts and experiences in the past. If you’re a first-year surgical resident, you might have an emotional response of discomfort at first when asked to cut into a patient’s flesh. And who could blame you? But after you’ve done it a few dozen times and become acclimated to performing surgical incisions, your reflexive emotional response will be modified. Eventually you’ll feel little, if any, emotional discomfort when beginning surgery.

  Another illustration of how experiences can influence our emotions is a phenomenon called “trauma triggers.” If an individual experienced (or witnessed) a very traumatic event in the past, such as a rape or attempted murder, he or she might feel an intense emotional response in the future when encountering a trigger associated with the event. For instance, if a bell was ringing during the murder, from that point on the sound of a bell might trigger feelings of fear, even though the trigger itself isn’t threatening in any way. Psychologists work with these victims to change their emotional responses by exposing them repeatedly to those same triggers in a safe and nonthreatening environment. Over time, the patient’s emotions associated with the trigger are reshaped by new thoughts and experiences, and the patient is habituated out of the fear response.

  While we may not be able to change our emotional responses quickly, these responses can and do change over time with experience and reflection. As they relate to our life-happiness preferences, emotions can be seen as the stored results of well-ingrained preferences. Our initial emotional response is the response that we’ve taught ourselves best represents our life-happiness preferences. The struggle we experience at times between our emotions and our mind’s ability to provide contrary reasoning is a struggle to identify our true life-happiness preferences. Are they the ones we had yesterday (the ones still ingrained in our emotional response), or are they the ones we are going to have tomorrow (which will shape our future emotional responses)? In other words, our inner emotional struggles are simply mental struggles over how we see our future selves and what we want our future life-happiness preferences to be.

  Some people are more introspective than others, and tend more often to reconcile their emotions with their thoughts. But the underlying mechanism for storing our preferences in the form of emotions occurs physiologically whether we think about them or not. In this sense, emotions aren’t a separate motivating factor in our choices—they are embedded in the process itself. Emotions remind us of our current life-happiness preferences.

  What about people who appear to openly shun the pursuit of happiness, such as ascetics—people who abstain from worldly pleasures to pursue religious and spiritual goals? What about Hindu sadhus who vow to stand only on one leg;7 Jains who fast for extended periods;8 Christian hermits who seclude themselves from all society;9 and observant Jews who give up the myriad joys of a tasty cheeseburger? Suicides present yet another seemingly confusing counterexample. In these cases, a person is consciously choosing to forgo all future possible happiness.

  While these extreme examples might appear to contradict our standard views of pursuing a life of happiness and avoiding pain, such behavior can still be seen as motivated by happiness preferences—albeit preferences that are foreign to most of us. For instance, ascetics derive more pleasure from their spiritual happiness and pride in their discipline than from the physical or emotional pains to which they subject themselves. As for people driven to suicide, many are experiencing such heartache and sadness that, at the moment they make the ultimate act, no possible future happiness seems capable of counteracting their pain. Indeed, suicide might be a rational choice for some people facing intense pain and suffering caused by an incurable illness.

  Most of us tend to think about our life-happiness preferences within a standard healthy psychological model. But what about people who might suffer from addictions such as anorexia or alcoholism? Are they optimizing their life-happiness?

  You might argue that people who have these psychological disorders are just bad at assessing how those behaviors will affect their lives. The anorexic might think that she will be more attractive if she is thinner but fails to grasp the long-term health impact starvation can cause. The alcoholic might fail to comprehend how his drunken behavior damages his relationships with others until his wife leaves him and takes the kids. Our ability to predict how our behaviors might affect our lives will always be flawed and imperfect. Once again, although we strive to optimize our life-happiness, we don’t always succeed.

  The Sixth Non-Commandment

  The claim that we all attempt to maximize our life-happiness preferences might seem at first blush to be an overly selfish view. Nowhere yet have we discussed the role of morals in the decision-making process. Surely this has an impact on our motivations? Absolutely—our morals do have an impact on out motivations. That will be the topic of the next chapter.

  For now, adding the notion of life-happiness to the list of Ten Non-commandments, we have:

  I.

  The world is real, and our desire to understand the world is the basis for belief.

  II.

  We can perceive the world only through our human senses.

  III.

  We use rational thought and language as tools for understanding the world.

  IV.

  All truth is proportional to the evidence.

  V.

  There is no God.

  VI.

  We all strive to live a happy life. We pursue things that make us happy and avoid things that do not.

  8

  How “Ought” One Behave?

  It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.

  —Sigmund Freud

  Up to this point we’ve only been talking about how we do behave. But we haven’t yet answered the question of how we should behave.

  The form of the question is particularly interesting. It assumes there is a “should,” which implies some greater reason, purpose, or obligation—maybe even an authority—that dictates how we are supposed to behave.

  To explore this notion of obligation further, let’s consider the following two statements evoking obligation:

  Statement 1: “I can’t join you tonight because I have to finish my work.”

&nbs
p; Statement 2: “I feel obliged to visit my sick mother in the hospital tomorrow.”

  The language of these sentences implies that there’s an unnamed motivation compelling the speaker to action. We could reveal the mystery motivator in statement 1 by adding that the speaker’s supervisor has ordered him to finish his work. In statement 2, we might add that since his mother cared for him whenever he was sick as a child, the speaker feels obligated to care for her now. Intrinsic to any expression of “ought” is the notion of some external motivating factor dictating what needs to be done.

  If we suppose for now that no such higher motivator exists, and also that our speaker has the ability to control his own actions, the above two statements can then be modified to read:

  Statement 1: “I cannot join you tonight because I choose to finish my work.”

  Statement 2: “I choose to visit my sick mother in the hospital tomorrow.”

  The impact of this simple word-substitution on these two sentences is huge. It removes the idea of obligation from the actions. Instead, the actions are governed by individual choices and desires. To go one step further, these choices can then be stated in terms of preferences for happiness. Recasting our two statements in this manner yields:

  Statement 1: “I cannot join you tonight because I choose to finish my work, and pleasing my boss will probably provide me with greater long-term happiness than risking his anger for missing a deadline by spending the evening with you.”

  Statement 2: “I choose to visit my sick mother in the hospital tomorrow because I know when I see the smile on her face when I arrive that her happiness will make me feel very happy.”

  These two examples show that it’s possible to recast statements of obligation as choices about happiness. Two concepts are essential to do this. First is that we’re all capable of making our own choices. Second is that nothing else forces us to act in a particular way other than our own thoughts, desires, and environment.