Response to "Are You Going to Force People to Be Happy? I'd Rather Die!" @/Andr%C3%A9sG%C3%B3mezEmilsson

Andrés Gómez Emilsson | Response to "Are You Going to Force People to Be Happy? I'd Rather Die!" @/Andr%C3%A9sG%C3%B3mezEmilsson | Uploaded August 2022 | Updated October 2024, 2 hours ago.
B1 - “Are you going to force people to be happy? I’d rather die.”

(On the Hedonistic Imperative Responses Bingo - hpluspedia.org/wiki/Responses_to_the_Hedonistic_Imperative_Bingo)

Nobody is going to force you into the pleasure chambers. Usually, the problem is that people (and non-human animals) cannot stop feeling pain, suffering, and malaise, not that they have too much happiness at their disposal. Ask yourself instead what could possibly be motivating this aesthetic response. Do you think people are out there trying to force you to be happy? If so, why? Could it be that you have some kind of social signaling going on that happiness would disrupt? Gaucho Marx’s “I wouldn't want to belong to a club that would have me as a member” is of course a *social stance* that signals independence, strong-mindedness, and a sense of superiority (“I wouldn’t let myself be fooled like everyone else”). But, verily I tell you, you are fooling yourself! For you do want to be happy, even if you don’t want to admit it to yourself.

The Hedonistic Imperative - hedweb.com

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$An Intuitive Explanation of the Symmetry Theory of Valence The Symmetry Theory of Valence posits that what makes an experience feel good or bad is its degree of symmetry and anti-symmetry. The intuition here is that the symmetry of the experience cashes out in the ability to effortlessly rest your attention while anti-symmetry has the effect of jittering your attention without your control. I then provide an intuitive explanation for why this might be true and why it tracks pleasure and pain. To do so I discuss the following key phenomena and take them as evidence for the Symmetry Theory of Valence: 1) Massage vs. bodily pain 2) The unpleasantness of dissonant sounds 3) Concentration meditation (why the Buddhist Jhanas, which have surprisingly low-information content, also have strong emotional qualities) 4) The emotional effects of *intense* stroboscopic stimulation 5) The reason why music sounds so compelling in dreams (its not the melody but the intensified resonance and reverb effects!) 6) How the various classes of euphoric drugs can be analyzed in light of their neuroacoustic effects (slow-euphoria as low-frequency consonance, fast-euphoria as high-frequency consonance, and criticality-euphoria as fractal consonance) 7) The phenomenal character of orgasm 8) The surprising EEG Gamma coherence of highly valenced states of consciousness such as those induced by 5-MeO-DMT 9) The subjective nature of anxiety (characterized in part by physiological prediction errors that jitter your attention) 10) Linguistic evidence (e.g. being twisted and screwed are negative while feeling harmony and balance are positive) For more, see: Qualia Research Institute website: https://qualiaresearchinstitute.org/ Qualia Computing website: https://qualiacomputing.com/ How the Symmetry Theory of Valence may cash out in better neuroscience: Quantifying Bliss - https://qualiacomputing.com/2017/06/18/quantifying-bliss-talk-summary/ ELI5 Symmetry Theory of Valence - https://opentheory.net/2017/04/stov-explain-like-im-5-edition/ And a wild-card link to keep you entertained: What’s out there? - https://opentheory.net/2019/09/whats-out-there/$

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