As you grow up, your perceptions gain depth: In your head, you have built up an elaborate model of the world and its structure and behavior. When you perceive, you perceive more than the immediate — you see context. You look at the thing in front of you and you see a computer, a keyboard, its functioning and, below the surface of perception, you know how it relates to other things, people and ideas.

As you grow old, your internal representation of the world gains more and more detail, albeit the rate of incremental updating slows down. Simultaneously, the world outside keeps on changing as rapidly as before. At some point, there you are, trying to interpret data from a world that has changed using a model that is no longer accurate. What can be expressed succinctly in the terminology that your outdated conceptual framework uses is different from that which is simple for younger people, and your framework is no longer an efficient representation of what is out there in the world.

What you see has always been an interpretation imposed on the data your eyes provide, but now your interpretation mechanism is tuned to a world from 30 years ago. When you talk to people and perceive the meaning of what they say, you round to the nearest simple interpretation in your model and reply to that; the actual intended meaning may not be easily expressible within the conceptual language you use to organize your world. You see and hear that which is in terms of what has been. You are growing blind.

Each dot is at least one person. If more than one person gave the same answer, the dot is bigger. Click on the graph for a better version, or take a look at the complete dataset.

I don’t know what to do with the graph, but lots of people wrote short comments explaining their choices which I really enjoyed reading. Here are some I liked, each with the age of the author and the age at which he/she expects to be the happiest:

An 18-year-old: 25
Because that’s when i’ll have a stable job, good income and my own house (hopefully).

A 25-year-old: 18
I wish I could stay 18 or ever.

A 33-year-old: 53
Will have met financial freedom and retirement goals.

A 46-year-old: 53
By the time I’m 53, I feel like I will be old enough to truly know myself and young enough to be physically fit.

A 53-year-old: 53
I was diagnosed with cancer around 2.5 years ago, went through the chemo and radiation. I’m finally at a point where I am grateful and happy that it was found in time to do something about it, and not worrying every second that it will come back. Not exactly a near-death experience, but as close as I want to come. Makes you REAL happy to be alive and to try and appreciate even the small things.

A 24-year-old: 40
I have already had a lot of happiness in my life and am very grateful for said happiness but I noticed that as my father ages, he seems to find more and more joy in the smaller things in life. Even in tough times he seems to maintain a more positive attitude – maybe it’s because he’s retired or he’s realized that worrying does’t accomplish much. I hope to achieve his level of wisdom someday and look forward to more happiness and fulfillment later in life.

A 53-year-old: 40
This was the point in my life that I had gotten through college, was married, had children and a career. I spent many hours at my childrens games (football, softball, etc) and and loved every minute if it! Financially, things were getting easier as my husband and I advanced in our careers so we could do more things such as travel and not have to worry so much about being able to afford it. It seemed that the hard work of college and “paying my dues” as I began my career were finally beginning to pay off.

A 21-year-old: 30
At 30, still young but old enough to be really developing my career.

A 30-year-old: 21
Life at my fingertips…

A 26-year-old: 35
I love the family life and independence; by the age mentioned I hope to have less day-to-day worries and more kids, but still be in a really good shape to enjoy it. Plus, I hope to be much more stable professionally.

A 34-year-old: 25
It’s amazing what experience, debt, and growing older can do to your outlook on life. I thought a decade ago I would be happer a decade later, and I am finding out that’s not really the case. I’m not unhappy by any means, but the more responsibilities we accrue in life, the easier it is to rate our happiness by different things.

A 23-year-old: 21
In college – so far it was the best time of my life. Hopefully it won’t be!

A 35-year-old: 21
College years were the best

An 18-year-old: 28
Done with college, can settle down, new job, etc

A 28-year-old: 22
I was a college student then. That were happiest years in my life, because my character shaped and tempered. Though any college assignment felt hard, I can enjoyed the hardship. Sincerely, I dreamed several times about my college years when I slept. I really missed that moment of life.

A 26-year-old: 15
15 was a great year. I was still to young to care and honestly thought the world was at my feet. I spent the school year hanging out with friends and of course school. Summer I spent most of it at my uncles enjoying time with my younger cousins and the cute boy down the street. Ahh… life before a I ever had a job.

Another 26-year-old: 26
As someone who has spent most of her short life daydreaming, I have learned not to waste my time measuring happiness or planning how to create it. I try and make the best of the present time and hope that I continue to do that for the rest of my life. Interesting question!

Yet another 26-year-old: 32
I feel by that time I will have finished grad school and be working in a field that I love. I will be more comfortable with who I am and my place in the world by that time.

A 26-year-old: 30
The day i get married will be the happiest day of my life.

A 41-year-old: 26
I met and married my husband at 26 years old. It was the best time of my life.

A 70-year-old: 30
We had a very happy marriage and two beautiful daughters. Although we are still married, things often got complicated and stressful but never hopeless.

A 23-year-old: 8
Childhood was a time of innocence; no worries, no bills, no thought as to cause and effect… You walk around with your fingers in your nose picking wedgies and thinking about the playground never wondering about world hunger war terrorism or even when companies may go bankrupt and cancel your favorite television show.

A 44-year-old: 25
The age I married my beloved husband and set out on our new life together. We are still together and still very happy. The adventures we share and have shared have brought so much joy to my life.

A 46-year-old: 34
I was happiest when I was single and working at the beginning of my professional career.

A 27-year-old: 45
Having children and watching them grow will give me the greatest joy.

A 38-year-old: 45
at that age most of my kids will be grown and hopefully I will be able to quit my job by then and do some of the things i would like to be able to do in my life

A 29-year-old: 16
I desperately miss the imagined knowledge and unknown ignorance of being in high school

Another 29-year-old: 17
Got married at 16 have 4 kids…so life has been challenging, wouldn’t trade them for anything…but would like to go back and have less responsability even for a little while :)

A 29-year-old: 26
This is the age that I came to the realization that I had finally found what I wanted. Everything just seemed to be coming together.

A 50-year-old: 26
At 26 i had my only child…and i was going to college, met a man of my dreams and felt like i could do it all..then i got involved with my child and man everything i wanted went out the window with in the first year..do i regret it sometimes would i change it not on my life

A 54-year-old: 23
I know for sure that as I age I get unhappier. At this point I’m thinking about how much longer I have as compared to having my whole life in front of me.

A 31-year-old: 50
I said 50 is the age I would be the happiest because it seems like the older I get the happier I am. And I hope that when I’m 50 I will continue to get more happy with each passing year and I hope to still be in great health.

A 44-year-old: 32
I finally had my child after trying for 10 years and my life was complete then.

A 43-year-old: 61
My youngest child will be of age and hopefully off to college \u0026 then I will be free to do what I want with my life.

A 39-year-old: 40
We had always known we wanted to adopt 2 special children and our hearts goal was that it would be by the time I am 40 and my husband 45. Our second and final adoption will be finalized in 2009 and I will be 40 years old.

A 46-year-old: 65
I am looking forward to 65, so I can retire, and actually take some time out to enjoy life.

A 65-year-old: 34
I was well on my way with a career wide open, had purchased my first house and had a great social life. Since then I have been up and down, but never so enthusiastic about life as I was then.

A 53-year-old: 22
We don’t appreciate things at a young age, but as we grow older we always wish we knew then what we know now.

A 22-year-old: 22
Two young daughters make my life the happiest! :)

A 30-year-old: 25
I was earning, was healthy, carefree. Looked as if there is enough time in life

A 62-year-old: 19
I was young, gorgeous, full of life and in love

This last one made me stop and stare at the screen for some time, simultaneously not knowing anything about this person and yet so much.

Update: David Sturman did some statistical analysis of the data that is worth reading.

Wie beeinflusst es unser Denken, wenn wir auf mehr unerwartete Informationen stoßen als gewohnt? Angenommen, auf dem Desktop erscheint jede Minute ein anderes, zufällig aus den 2,3 Millionen englischen Wikipedia-Artikeln ausgewähltes Thema und dazu eine kurze Beschreibung. Ist die einzige Auswirkung davon, dass wir uns noch leichter von dem ablenken lassen, was wir erreichen wollen?

Oder gibt es Tätigkeiten, auf die es sich positiv auswirkt, eine Vielzahl unterschiedlicher Erinnerungen kurz zu aktivieren (Priming), so dass mit diesen verbundene Konzepte in der darauf folgenden Zeit für Assoziationen zur Verfügung stehen, bei denen sie sonst möglicherweise nicht aufgerufen worden wären?

Mac-User können das selbst ausprobieren:

1. GeekTool installieren.

2. random_wiki.py herunterladen.

3. python /path/to/random_wiki.py

   als Shell-Kommando zu GeekTool hinzufügen.

4. cat /tmp/random_word

   als Shell-Kommando zu GeekTool hinzufügen.

Das, was uns durchgedacht und zugeschnürt vorgesetzt wird, mögen wir akzeptieren, aber wir werden es niemals verteidigen. Null Inferenzschritte. Nur das, was wir selbst entdecken, machen wir uns zu eigen. Wenn wir bereits Ideen absorbieren, für die wir uns ohne Überzeugung und von der Endidee ausgehend Argumente ausdenken, wie viel stärker fühlen wir uns dann zu Ideen hingezogen, die wir selbst erdacht haben?

Wissenschaft funktioniert, weil jede Veröffentlichung (hoffentlich) Daten enthält, von denen aus wir den letzten Inferenzschritt selbst vollziehen können. Kunst funktioniert, weil sie Ideen nimmt und von dort aus einige Inferenzschritte rückwärts geht.

In einer Welt idealer Rationalisten macht es keinen* Unterschied, ob die letzten gedanklichen Schritte selbst ausgeführt oder fertig präsentiert werden. In unserer Welt dagegen ist es leicht, mich von einer Idee zu überzeugen. Ich muss die Idee dazu nur als meine eigene ansehen.

Wir wachen auf und erzählen davon, wie wir eine zeitlich und räumlich zusammenhängende Geschichte erlebt haben. Wir erinnern uns an das, was uns und den Menschen, die wir tagsüber oder vor 10 Jahren gesehen haben, in unserer lila-weißen Traumwelt passiert ist. Erinnerung impliziert, dass da etwas ist, was vor dem Moment des Erinnerns da war.

Wenn wir uns daran erinnern, dass die letzten 10 Traumminuten auf das perfekt in den Traum integrierte Weckerklingeln ausgerichtet waren — ist die räumliche und zeitliche Struktur unseres Traumes dann mehr als eine im Moment des Aufwachens erdachte Erklärung für die Aktivität der Nervenzellen, die wir durch unser Erwachen beim Reorganisieren ertappt haben?

(Wenn ja: Wie lässt sich das experimentell für “normale” Träume zeigen? Wenn nein: Wie passen luzide Träume in dieses Bild?)

I just wrote my first letter in ten years and it felt strange. The blue liquid flowing out of my pen and onto the thin sheet of cellulose in front of me. The cell walls of a dead tree, now functioning as a kind of disposable monitor. The paper soaked with watery circles and lines, clearly one of the most wasteful ways to store one kilobyte of plain text. In a few minutes, on my way to the Christmas market, I will put this unlikely storage medium in a yellow box next to the sidewalk, knowing that tomorrow, someone will pick it up, drive it across Germany and bring it not to the addressee, but to yet another box where she will show up, sooner or later. This takes roughly 100.000 times as long as an e-mail.

E-mail is less awkward, but not by far. Part of me enjoys typing really fast, probably due to having seen too many hacker movies in my teenage years. The rest of me snickers at the idea of moving muscles and bones, pushing fingertips on black plastic, in order to transmit information from one system using electrical signals to another one. For each bit that makes its way from my head into my computer, I move a billion billion billion electrons when one would suffice.

Each intermediate step in the process of information transmission creates borders between us and makes our conversations less intimate. Bandwidth is growing, delays and barriers are going away (the final barrier being the conversion from semantics to syntax and back).

In 2007, writing a letter is like playing with mud and electricity because you are hungry and it can’t take that long until something akin to an apple tree evolves.
 
Like taking money out of your bank account and giving it away minutes later in exchange for the thing you really wanted even if you could have paid with your EC card, because you always did it this way.
 
Like taking pictures with your old analog camera and scanning them later on, because style is not defined in pixels per cm².
 
Like writing a letter, because the textual content was little more than an envelope, because what you actually said was “I care”, and because the most efficient way would have been the least effective.

What appears to be context may be information, what appears to be information may be context. The failure or refusal to accept the unspoken social contract that defines which is which is one of the main reasons why nerds are socially inept. Think small talk.

(I don’t do programming anymore.)

Auf der Suche nach Wahrheit sollten wir Welt- und Menschenbilder in dem Moment verwerfen, in dem wir merken, dass es uns schwer fällt, Hinweise dafür zu finden, dass sie die Welt besser beschreiben als konkurrierende Ideen. Weil das, was wir momentan glauben, beeinflusst, mit wem wir zu tun haben, welche Informationen wir an uns heran lassen und wie wir Nachrichten interpretieren, sollten wir dem unguten Gefühl im großen Denkknäuel umso mehr Aufmerksamkeit schenken.

Die Realität ist, wie sie ist, unabhängig davon, was wir glauben (und das ändert sich auch nicht dadurch, dass die Autorin eines der populärsten amerikanischen Bücher der letzten Monate das Gegenteil behauptet). Die meisten von uns können nicht vermeiden, im Laufe ihres Lebens der Wahrheit näher zu kommen, sei es in Bezug auf Wissenschaft, Beziehungen oder Menschen im Allgemeinen. Insofern ist es sinnvoller, wenn wir falsche Einstellungen nicht zunächst verteidigen und uns langsam zurückziehen, sondern mit jedem gegenteiligen Indiz die Wahrscheinlichkeit unserer Ideen nach unten korrigieren und unplausible Theorien so früh wie möglich verwerfen. Wenn das bedeutet, zu verstehen, dass Zynismus in manch ungemütlicher Hinsicht Realismus ist, müssen wir auch das akzeptieren (oder private Inseln schaffen, auf denen andere Regeln gelten — aber dem Willen von Welt und Evolution widersetzt man sich nicht leicht und selten auf Dauer).

Menschen sind zu anpassungsfähig, als dass uns kurzfristiges Unglück abschrecken sollte, insbesondere nicht dann, wenn es auf längere Sicht zu mehr Wahrheit und damit zu einer höheren Chance darauf führt, unsere Ziele zu erreichen. Wir gewöhnen uns an praktisch jede Änderung so weit, dass unsere Lebenszufriedenheit nach einiger Zeit der vor der Veränderung entspricht. Wir gewöhnen uns an Klassen von Veränderungen, egal ob Tod (nun ja, zumindest an den anderer Leute — beim eigenen bleibt wenig Gewöhnungszeit), Trennung oder andere Traumata, indem wir abrufbare Verhaltensmuster entwickeln und vermutlich gewöhnen wir uns auch an den Gesamtpegel an Veränderungen in unserem Leben.

In den Augenblicken, in denen wir die Götter nicht dafür verfluchen, dass gerade diese Anpassungsfähigkeit uns gegenüber den Tragödien dieser Welt blind macht, sollten wir ihnen danken, denn manche Veränderungen sind endgültig. Manche Dinge kann man nur einmal sagen und so meinen. Das rettet unser Handeln vor Bedeutungslosigkeit; der Wert dessen, was wir tun, liegt in den Dingen, auf die wir dafür verzichten. Dinge, für die man nichts aufgeben würde, sind nichts wert. Es ist nicht die Hochzeitszeremonie, die dem “Ja, ich will” so viel Wert verleiht, sondern das Wissen, dass wir mit den Worten manche Freiheiten für jemand anderen und für immer aufgeben (oder, wenn wir sie wiedererlangen wollen, das nur unter mittelschweren gesellschaftlichen Strafen tun können).

Was wahr ist ändert sich nicht dadurch, dass wir anderer Meinung sind oder dadurch, dass wir es ignorieren. Das, was wir tun, wird durch das bedeutungsvoll, was wir nicht tun. Glück braucht Bedeutung um nicht leer zu sein, Bedeutung braucht Wahrheit um überhaupt zu existieren. Sowohl Glück als auch Unglück sind Teil unserer Welt und je besser wir diese Welt verstehen, desto mehr Einfluss haben wir auf sie.

Nonetheless I do not believe in demons. The concept of demons is lousy at explaining what goes on in ill minds and has been replaced by psychological theories that, albeit less colorful, have much greater explanatory power. Nothing that exists in the real world has been shown to inhabit the causal position that was attributed to demons with regard to mental “misbehavior”.

Eliminative materialists deny that beliefs are any more real than demons. According to Paul Churchland, beliefs and other propositional attitudes don’t refer to anything in the real world. Nothing has the causal and semantic properties we attribute to beliefs, therefore these concepts will eventually be replaced by a theory of mind that explains our actions, thoughts and sensations a lot better than folk psychology and that is based on empiricism rather than introspection.

In order to examine whether eliminative materialism makes sense, I am first going to look at what folk psychology, the theory eliminative materialism intends to replace, actually looks like and, especially, what the building blocks of folk psychology — propositional attitudes like beliefs and desires — really are. In the next step, I evaluate Churchland’s arguments in favor of eliminative materialism and contrast his theory with an approach to the theory of mind that does not question the validity of propositional attitudes.

Folk Psychology

A proposition is the content of a statement that can be true or false. When we talk about the world, we usually use propositions. “It is raining outside” is a simple example. A propositional attitude is the attitude of a person towards a proposition. I can have different attitudes towards one proposition, for instance, I can believe that it is raining outside, I can desire rain or fear rain. Intentionality is often described as the “aboutness” of mental states. Mental states have the unique property of being directed at objects. Since propositional states, e.g. the hope that it is raining outside, are about something, in my example the rain outside, they are said to be intentional mental states.

When Churchland uses the term “folk psychology”, he refers to our habit of relating different propositional attitudes towards each other in law-like ways. Two propositional attitudes may be equivalent, mutually inconsistent or one attitude may entail the other. When we talk about other people and we mention that someone fears that x happens, we usually infer that this person does not desire that x happens. We are experts at predicting the behavior of other persons by attributing certain attitudes to them and thinking about the actions these attitudes result in.

We are similarly good at predicting the physical behavior of middle-sized, common objects because doing so was just as helpful in our evolutionary past as being able to predict the behavior of our friends and foes. Nonetheless, our common-sense beliefs about physics are as intuitive as they are fundamentally flawed. If you did not take physics in high school, you might even think that there is such as thing as objective time. It turns out that this is not true. For some observers, A happens before B, for others B before A — a fact that is hard to digest even years after hearing about it the first time.

Scientific Thinking

When we ponder how to decide the question whether we have reason to think that our intuitive notion of beliefs and similar attitudes is not as far from reality as our intuitive notion of physics, it is helpful to remember how we decide analogous questions in physics. When we have two competing theories and none of them is obviously false, we let nature decide and favor the theory that is most exact in its predictions. If one theory works well for one area and a different theory works better for others — think of general relativity and quantum mechanics — we choose predictive success over consistency and use each theory where it works best.

Before starting to take apart folk psychology in scientific terms, we first need to establish whether it actually is a scientific theory. In science, a theory is an explanation of a natural phenomenon that is capable of predicting future observations of the same kind, and capable of being falsified through empirical observation. Our network of common-sense psychological concepts enables us to explain and predict the behavior of other persons with remarkable success. Since these predictions are predictions over behavior, they can be falsified, and, if they are falsified, we need to doubt the folk-psychological hypotheses folk-psychology relies on.

According to Churchland, folk psychology is inadequate in its explanations, has not improved significantly over the last 2000 years, limits its explanatory power by focusing on propositional elements and does not even have the normative qualities that are sometimes attributed to it.

It is true that folk psychology cannot explain lots of important phenomena. Mental illness, creativity, differences in intelligence, the psychological function of sleep, perceptual illusions, nonlinguistic learning processes — the list of those aspects of mind that are not accounted for by our everyday thinking in terms of propositional attitudes could be almost arbitrarily long. This does not necessarily imply that folk psychology is false, but it does suggest that, as a scientific theory, it is by far more shallow than an elaborate theory of mind should be. A theory that makes no predictions at all about lots of the phenomena we are interested in is only barely better than a theory that makes wrong predictions.

Folk psychology has remained largely unchanged for the last 2000 years. Looking at the list of unexplained phenomena, one could expect a steady improvement of folk psychology in order for it to catch up with the advances of neuroscience. Nothing like this is happening. For all practical purposes, the folk psychology of today is identical to the folk psychology of the Greeks two or three thousand years ago.

Folk psychology is limited by the fact that its elements are modeled on the elements of human language. This is a subtle point. We live in a world where nearly all the talk about thoughts is talk about propositions, therefore the constraints that are imposed upon us are not apparent to us. Nonetheless they do exist and keep us from describing processes like the large-scale non-linguistic conceptual changes that go on during the first months of a new-born in any meaningful way.

Even as a normative theory, a theory that describes how we should behave, folk psychology is far from perfect. The normative dimension of folk psychology depends on how we value the propositions it deals with, its rationality is not ideal (since we do not know how such a rationality would look like) and it is questionable whether a framework of cognitive virtue would really work on the level of propositional attitudes since this presupposes the use of language.

Eliminative Materialism

The conclusion from all these deficits is called eliminative materialism and can be summed up as follows: Folk psychology describes our internal activities in a way that is a radically inadequate. As a scientific theory, it is probably too confused and too incomplete than that it could ever be fixed by small adjustments and, therefore, it will be replaced by a better theory sooner or later. Even if it is hard to imagine a world that does completely without current folk psychology since this theory is involved with every aspect of our culture, it does not have any features that justify its predominant status.

Quite to the contrary: If we accept that our introspective judgement does not have any special status or any guarantee for being right, we might realize that the conviction that there has to exist something that has the causal and semantic properties we attribute to propositional attitudes has long been one of the obstacles to a unified theory of mind. It might feel as if our thoughts were about something, but this is less important for the issue at hand than one might think. How something feels to us does not say much about how the physical reality of our thought processes looks like. The subjective feeling itself is to be explained by qualia, not by intentionality, and Churchland does not claim that qualia can be eliminated. The concept of intentionality, however, will turn out to be empty quickly as soon as we switch to the framework of eliminative materialism.

The central claim of eliminative materialism might be one of those facts that are hard to digest even years after hearing about them the first time: Beliefs will not be explained by neuroscience as the result of some low-level brain functions. Beliefs simply don’t exist.

Still I won’t be able to stop thinking in terms of beliefs and desires, fears and hopes, mostly because it is the only way that works from a pragmatic point of view. I have to admit that I could not give up my Newtonian intuitions on everyday physics after I learned about general relativity and quantum physics either. The human mind has not been shaped by evolution to match reality where a less expensive and less accurate hack suffices to keep our genes in circulation. The best we can currently hope for is to realize that it is not the world that is bizarre — it is our intuitions.

Andererseits hat jede wissenschaftliche Revolution in den Köpfen einzelner Personen angefangen und sich oft nur langsam ausgebreitet. Die Tatsache, dass eine Idee unpopulär ist, sagt nichts über ihren Wahrheitsgehalt aus. Es gab eine Zeit, als die vorherrschende Meinung war, dass die Erde eine Scheibe sei. Ein großer Teil der in unserer Gesellschaft herumschwirrenden Ideen kann einfach nicht wahr sein — allein aus dem Grund, dass sie sich gegenseitig widersprechen.

Nicht eine Person ist Anhänger einer Idee, die sie für falsch hält. Niemand will einer Randgruppe angehören, die ihrer Version der Realität hinterherläuft. Niemand will Irrtümer und irrationalen Handlungsweisen übernehmen, nur weil sie weit verbreitet sind. Rationales Denken, evolutionäre Psychologie und Entscheidungstheorie können einige offensichtliche Fehler eliminieren, aber Sicherheit gibt es nicht.

Seine Meinung nicht zu äußern hat den Vorteil, dass man nicht so schnell Gefahr läuft, an einer falschen Einstellung festzuhalten, weil das Ändern der Meinung ohne “Ich habe Blödsinn geredet”-Eingeständnisse leichter ist. Und den Nachteil, dass man nicht merkt, wenn man Blödsinn denkt.

Wer die Wahl zwischen zwei Weltbildern hat, wird sich das Weltbild zu eigen machen, das es ihm erlaubt, so weiterzuleben wie bisher und sich dabei gut zu fühlen.