it make better sense to say that by learning to enjoy cigars I changed my experiential background and inadvertently ruined all future experiences that do not include them? The Hawaiian sunset was an eight until the Hawaiian sunset a la stogie took its place and reduced the cigarless sunset to a mere seven.29
But we’ve talked enough about me and my holiday. Let’s talk about me and my guitar. I’ve played the guitar for years, and I get very little pleasure from executing an endless repetition of three-chord blues. But when I first learned to play as a teenager, I would sit upstairs in my bedroom happily strumming those three chords until my parents banged on the ceiling and invoked their rights under the Geneva Convention. I suppose we could try the language-squishing hypothesis here and say that my eyes have been opened by my improved musical abilities and that I now realize I was not really happy in those teenage days. But doesn’t it seem more reasonable to invoke the experience-stretching hypothesis and say that an experience that once brought me pleasure no longer does? A man who is given a drink of water after being lost in the Mojave Desert for a week may at that moment rate his happiness as eight. A year later, the same drink might induce him to feel no better than two. Are we to believe that he was wrong about how happy he was when he took that life-giving sip from a rusty canteen, or is it more reasonable to say that a sip of water can be a source of ecstasy or a source of moisture depending on one’s experiential background? If impoverished experiential backgrounds squish our language rather than stretch our experience, then children who say they are delighted by peanut butter and jelly are just plain wrong, and they will admit it later in life when they get their first bite of goose liver, at which time they will be right, until they get older and begin to get heartburn from fatty foods, at which time they will realize that they were wrong then too. Every day would be a repudiation of the day before, as we experienced greater and greater happiness and realized how thoroughly deluded we were until, conveniently enough, now.
So which hypothesis is correct? We can’t say. What we can say is that all claims of happiness are claims from someone’s point of view–from the perspective of a single human being whose unique collection of past experiences serves as a context, a lens, a background for her evaluation of her current experience. As much as the scientist might wish for it, there isn’t a view from nowhere. Once we have an experience, we are thereafter unable to see the world as we did before. Our innocence is lost and we cannot go home again. We may remember what we thought or said (though not necessarily), and we may remember what we did (though not necessarily that either), but the likelihood is depressingly slim that we can resurrect our experience and then evaluate it as we would have back then. In some ways, the cigar-smoking, guitar-playing, pate-eating people we become have no more authority to speak on behalf of the people we used to be than do outside observers. The separated twins may be able to tell us how they now feel about having been conjoined, but they cannot tell us how conjoined twins who have never experienced separation feel about it. No one knows if Reba’s and Lori’s eight feels like our eight, and that includes all the Rebas and Loris that will ever be.
Onward
On the morning of 15 May 1916, the arctic explorer Ernest Shackle-ton began the last leg of one of history’s most gruelling adventures. His ship, the Endurance, had sunk in the Weddell Sea, stranding him and his crew on Elephant Island. After seven months, Shackleton and five of his crewmen boarded a small lifeboat in which they spent three weeks crossing eight hundred miles of frigid, raging ocean. Upon reaching South Georgia Island, the starving, frostbitten men prepared to disembark and cross the island on foot in the hope of reaching a whaling station on the other side. No one had ever survived that trek. Facing almost certain death that morning, Shackleton wrote:
We passed through the narrow mouth of the cove with the ugly rocks and waving kelp close on either side, turned to the east, and sailed merrily up the bay as the sun broke through the mists and made the tossing waters sparkle around us. We were a curious-looking party on that bright morning, but we were feeling happy. We even broke into song, and, but for our Robinson Crusoe appearance, a casual observer might have taken us for a picnic party sailing in a Norwegian fjord or one of the beautiful sounds of the west coast of New Zealand.30
Could Shackleton really have meant what he said? Could his happy be our happy, and is there any way to tell? As we’ve seen, happiness is a subjective experience that is difficult to describe to ourselves and to others, thus evaluating people’s claims about their own happiness is an exceptionally thorny business. But don’t worry–because before business gets better, it gets a whole lot thornier.
Go to your bosom;
Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.
Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
THERE AREN’T MANY JOKES about psychology professors, so we tend to cherish the few we have. Here’s one. What do psychology professors say when they pass each other in the hallway? ‘Hi, you’re fine, how am I?’ I know, I know. The joke isn’t that funny. But the reason it’s supposed to be funny is that people shouldn’t know how others are feeling but they should know how they’re feeling themselves. ‘How are you?’ is overly familiar for the same reason that ‘How am I?’ is overly strange. And yet, strange as it is, there are times when people seem not to know their own hearts. When conjoined twins claim to be happy, we have to wonder if perhaps they just think they’re happy. That is, they may believe what they’re saying, but what they’re saying may be wrong. Before we can decide whether to accept people’s claims about their happiness, we must first decide whether people can, in principle, be mistaken about what they feel. We can be wrong about all sorts of things–the price of soybeans, the life span of dust mites, the history of flannel–but can we be wrong about our own emotional experience? Can we believe we are feeling something we aren’t? Are there really people out there who can’t accurately answer the world’s most familiar question?
Yes, and you’ll find one in the mirror. Read on.
Dazed and Confused
But not just yet. Before you read on, I challenge you to stop and have a nice long look at your thumb. Now, I will wager that you did not accept my challenge. I will wager that you went right on reading because looking at your thumb is so easy that it makes for rather pointless sport–everyone bats a thousand and the game is called on account of boredom. But if looking at your thumb seems beneath you, just consider what actually has to happen for us to see an object in our environment–a thumb, a glazed doughnut or a rabid wolverine. In the tiny gap between the time that the light reflected from the surface of the object reaches our eyes and the time that we become aware of the object’s identity, our brains must extract and analyse the object’s features and compare them with information in our memory to determine what the thing is and what we ought to do about it. This is complicated stuff–so complicated that no scientist yet understands precisely how it happens and no computer can simulate the trick–but it is just the sort of complicated stuff that brains do with exceptional speed and accuracy. In fact, they perform these analyses with such proficiency that we have the experience of simply looking leftward, seeing a wolverine, feeling afraid and preparing to do all further analysis from the safety of a sycamore tree.
Think for a moment about how looking ought to happen. If you were designing a brain from scratch, you would probably design it so that it first identified objects in its environment (‘Sharp teeth, brown fur, weird little snorting sound, hot drool–why, that’s a rabid wolverine!’) and then figured out what to do (‘Leaving seems like a splendid idea about now’). But human brains were not designed from scratch. Rather, their most critical functions were designed first,