The Hedonic Treadmill and Happiness

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There's this idea called the hedonic treadmill, which I think some people have said have been has been discredited. But it does seem compatible with the whole predictive modeling view of what the brain is doing. Can happiness be understood as noticing that our prediction was a little pessimistic and things are actually a little bit better? That sounds like a great account of why we think there's an arrow of time. We feel it, right? Why that's part of our image of the world.

What is the mind, and what does it try to do? An overly simplified materialist view might be that the mind emerges from physical processes in the brain. But you can be a materialist and still recognize that there is more to the mind than just the brain: the rest of our bodies play a role, and arguably we should count physical artifacts that contribute to our memory and cognition as part of "the mind." Or so argues today's guest, philosopher/cognitive scientist Andy Clark. As to what the mind does, it tries to predict what happens next. This simple idea provides a powerful lens through which to interpret all the different things our minds do, including the idea that "perception is controlled hallucination."

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Andy Clark received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Sussex. He is currently Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at Sussex. He was Director of the Philosophy/Neuroscience/Psychology Program at Washington University in St Louis, and Director of the Cogntive Science Program at Indiana University. His new book is The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality.

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