Stumbling on Happiness
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Оглавление
Daniel Gilbert. Stumbling on Happiness
Copyright
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
PART I Prospection
CHAPTER I Journey to Elsewhen
The Joy of Next
The Ape That Looked Forward
Twisting Fate
Prospection and Emotion
Prospection and Control
Onward
PART II Subjectivity
CHAPTER 2 The View from in Here
Dancing About Architecture
Feeling Happy
Feeling Happy Because
Feeling Happy About
New Yeller
Remembering Differences
Perceiving Differences
Happy Talk
Squishing Language
Stretching Experience
Onward
CHAPTER 3 Outside Looking In
Dazed and Confused
Comfortably Numb
Warm the Happyometer
Measuring Right
Measuring Often
Onward
PART III Realism
CHAPTER 4 In the Blind Spot of the Mind’s Eye
Little Big Head
Filling in Memory
Filling in Perception
The Meat Loaf of Oz
Discovering Idealism
Escaping Realism
An Embarrassment of Tomorrows
Onward
CHAPTER 5 The Hound of Silence
The Sailors Not
Absence in the Present
Absence in the Future
On the Event Horizon
Onward
PART IV Presentism
CHAPTER 6 The Future Is Now
More of the Same
Presentism in the Past
Presentism in the Future
Sneak Prefeel
The Power of Prefeeling
The Limits of Prefeeling
Onward
CHAPTER 7 Time Bombs
SpaceThink
Starting Now
Next to Nothing
Comparing with the Past
Comparing with the Possible
Comparing and Presentism
Onward
PART V Rationalization
CHAPTER 8 Paradise Glossed
Stop Annoying People
Disambiguating Objects
Disambiguating Experience
Cooking with Facts
Finding Facts
Challenging Facts
Onward
CHAPTER 9 Immune to Reality
Looking Forward to Looking Backward
Little Triggers
The Intensity Trigger
The Inescapability Trigger
Explaining Away
Onward
PART VI Corrigibility
CHAPTER 10 Once Bitten
The Least Likely of Times
All’s Well
The Way We Weren’t
Onward
CHAPTER 11 Reporting Live from Tomorrow
Super-replicators
The Myth of Fingerprints
Finding the Solution
Rejecting the Solution
Onward
AFTERWORD
NOTES. Foreword
Chapter 1: Journey to Elsewhen
Chapter 2: The View from in Here
Chapter 3: Outside Looking In
Chapter 4: In the Blind Spot of the Mind’s Eye
Chapter 5: The Hound of Silence
Chapter 6: The Future Is Now
Chapter 7: Time Bombs
Chapter 8: Paradise Glossed
Chapter 9: Immune to Reality
Chapter 10: Once Bitten
Chapter 11: Reporting Live from Tomorrow
Afterword
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
About the Author
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
About the Publisher
Отрывок из книги
WHAT WOULD YOU DO right now if you learned that you were going to die in ten minutes? Would you race upstairs and light that Marlboro you’ve been hiding in your sock drawer since the Ford administration? Would you waltz into your boss’s office and present him with a detailed description of his personal defects? Would you drive out to that steakhouse near the new mall and order a T-bone, medium rare, with an extra side of the really bad cholesterol? Hard to say, of course, but of all the things you might do in your final ten minutes, it’s a pretty safe bet that few of them are things you actually did today.
Now, some people will bemoan this fact, wag their fingers in your direction, and tell you sternly that you should live every minute of your life as though it were your last, which only goes to show that some people would spend their final ten minutes giving other people dumb advice. The things we do when we expect our lives to continue are naturally and properly different than the things we might do if we expected them to end abruptly. We go easy on the lard and tobacco, smile dutifully at yet another of our boss’s witless jokes, read books like this one when we could be wearing paper hats and eating pistachio macaroons in the bathtub, and we do each of these things in the charitable service of the people we will soon become. We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy. Rather than indulging in whatever strikes our momentary fancy, we take responsibility for the welfare of our future selves, squirrelling away portions of our paycheques each month so they can enjoy their retirements on a putting green, jogging and flossing with some regularity so they can avoid coronaries and gum grafts, enduring dirty nappies and mind-numbing repetitions of The Cat in the Hat so that someday they will have fat-cheeked grandchildren to bounce on their laps. Even plunking down a dollar at the convenience store is an act of charity intended to ensure that the person we are about to become will enjoy the cupcake we are paying for now. In fact, just about any time we want something–a promotion, a marriage, an automobile, a cheeseburger–we are expecting that if we get it, then the person who has our fingerprints a second, minute, day or decade from now will enjoy the world they inherit from us, honoring our sacrifices as they reap the harvest of our shrewd investment decisions and dietary forbearance.
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Prospection and Control
Prospection can provide pleasure and prevent pain, and this is one of the reasons why our brains stubbornly insist on churning out thoughts of the future. But it is not the most important reason. Americans gladly pay millions–perhaps even billions–of dollars every year to psychics, investment advisors, spiritual leaders, weather forecasters and other assorted hucksters who claim they can predict the future. Those of us who subsidize these fortune-telling industries do not want to know what is likely to happen just for the joy of anticipating it. We want to know what is likely to happen so that we can do something about it. If interest rates are going to skyrocket next month, then we want to shift our money out of bonds right now. If it is going to rain this afternoon, then we want to grab an umbrella this morning. Knowledge is power, and the most important reason why our brains insist on simulating the future even when we’d rather be here now, enjoying a goldfish moment, is that our brains want to control the experiences we are about to have.
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