Author Topic: The Happiness of Pursuit  (Read 2141 times)

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The Happiness of Pursuit
« on: June 14, 2012, 02:34:36 AM »



Pub Date: Feb. 1st, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-465-02224-3
Page count: 240pp
Publisher: Basic

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hubag bohol

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Re: The Happiness of Pursuit
« Reply #1 on: June 14, 2012, 02:36:39 AM »
Before dealing with the question of happiness, the author elaborates on his contention that human minds could evolve “to support foresight” because of the brain's ability to “compute by learning and using the statistics of the world in which we live.” He explains this with examples such as the ability of a baseball pitcher's brain to specify the location of his body and control its action by directing his shoulder according to horizontal and vertical planes and rotation, while anticipating a ball's trajectory; or the more mundane ability of a shopper to estimate which is the fastest check-out lane. Our brains are continually deluged with data that must be evaluated for cognition to occur. Survival of the organism depends on its ability to foresee the future and act accordingly. Edelman writes that this is the basis for the pursuit of happiness in humans, and by extension all living beings. On a more sophisticated level, humans retain memories and develop foresight, which the author felicitously describes as “remembering the future.” We build up expectations while savoring the past and imagining possible futures, with episodic memory acting as “the mind's personal space-time machine—a perfect vehicle for scouting and harvesting happiness.” Edelman describes learning language as a similar process that depends on the brain’s use of statistics as a basis for inferences about meaning, and concludes that we derive our most sustained happiness from our predisposition to “enjoy every day learning.”

An elegant tour de force that combines neuropsychology with liberal references to Shakespeare and Homer.

(reviewed on December 15, 2011)
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/

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Re: The Happiness of Pursuit
« Reply #2 on: June 14, 2012, 02:40:09 AM »
“[A]n owner’s manual for the mind, albeit an entertaining one.”
—Greater Good

“[An] accessible volume on the science of the brain and mind.… Drawing on hard science, literature, and observations of the human condition, the work presents a readable narrative covering both physical and psychological aspects of happiness.”
—Book News

“In The Happiness of Pursuit…Shimon Edelman takes an unconventional – and cautiously self-aware of its own unorthodoxy – lens to the holy grain of human existence, blending hard science with literature and philosophy to reverse-engineer the brain’s capacity for well-being. What emerges is a kind of conceptual toolbox that lets us peer into the computational underbelly of our minds and its central processes – memory, perception, motivation and emotion, critical thinking, social cognition, and language – to better understand not only how the mind works but also how we can optimize it for happiness…. [The] blend of philosophy and science is indeed the defining, winning characteristic of The Happiness of Pursuit, the underlying message of which may seem simple – roughly captured by the tired yet infinitely true adage, ‘Stop and smell the roses,’ and premised on the idea that experience itself, or ‘pursuit,’ is the true fountain of happiness – but it cuts to the heart of what we intuit to be true, and does so with a razor-sharp blade of science and critical thought.”
—Brain Pickings

Read the entire review


“The Happiness of Pursuit is for fans of inquiries into the nature of the brain, mind—and happiness itself…. [Edelman] offers a happy addition to the classic recipe of ‘self-knowledge, self-improvement, and, eventually, selfless conduct’—a coherent notion of the self.”

—New Scientist

“From Bayes’ theorem of probability to Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ Edelman offers a range of references and allegories to explain why a changing, growing self, constantly shaped by new experiences, is happier than the satisfaction any end goal can give us. It turns out the rewards we get for learning and understanding the workings of the world really make it the journey, not the destination, that matters most.”

—Salon
 

“Taking passages by luminaries including Homer, William Shakespeare and Jorge Luis Borges as touchstones, Edelman powers along on his ‘quest for an algorithmic understanding of happiness’, revealing that it is this computational journey that constitutes the good life.”

—Nature


“An elegant tour de force that combines neuropsychology with liberal references to Shakespeare and Homer.”

—Kirkus Reviews



“Edelman marries his scientific mind with his poetic eye to give us the neuroscience that matters the most: an understanding of our own lives.”

—David Eagleman, Director, Laboratory for Perception and Action,Baylor College of Medicine, and author of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain



“The ancient injunction to ‘Know thyself’ gets a lively update in Shimon Edelman’s eclectic examination of ‘knowing’ and ‘self’ through the lens of twenty-first century cognitive science. It’s human to wander thoughtfully through real and imaginary landscapes, learning as we go—this is happiness, embodied in Edelman’s witty odyssey, which provokes the very pleasures it describes.”

—Dan Lloyd, Brownell Professor of Philosophy, Trinity College



“For all its seriousness, ambition, and learning, Shimon Edelman’s The Happiness of Pursuit is an extraordinarily human book. It is ambitious because he bases his view of the nature of happiness on what for many of his readers will be an unusual conception of the relation between the brain, the Self, and the body. Happiness, says Edelman, is not simply a state of mind one tries to attain, but an unceasing activity. That is,whenever it does attain its goal, after a pause for savoring its success it must change its goal for a new one. The Happiness of Pursuit shows Edelman to be a witty, resourceful, raconteur. You never forget his presence. He leans out of his book as if he were at an open window beckoning to us to come inside and listen.”       

—Ben-Ami Scharfstein, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy,Tel-Aviv University, and author of Art Without Borders: A Philosophical Exploration of Art and Humanity

http://www.happinessofpursuitbook.com/

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hubag bohol

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Re: The Happiness of Pursuit
« Reply #3 on: June 14, 2012, 02:42:51 AM »
The Happiness of Pursuit: What Science and Philosophy Can Teach Us About the Holy Grail of Existence
by Maria Popova
http://www.brainpickings.org/


“When fishing for happiness, catch and release.”


The secret of happiness is arguably humanity’s longest-standing fixation, and its mechanisms are among the most consuming obsessions of modern science. In The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life, Cornell University psychology professor Shimon Edelman takes an unconventional — and cautiously self-aware of its own unorthodoxy — lens to the holy grail of human existence, blending hard science with literature and philosophy to reverse-engineer the brain’s capacity for well-being. What emerges is a kind of conceptual toolbox that lets us peer into the computational underbelly of our minds and its central processes — memory, perception, motivation and emotion, critical thinking, social cognition, and language — to better understand not only how the mind works but also how we can optimize it for happiness.

As it turns out, a fundamental truth about happiness lies in the very language of the Declaration of Independence, which encouraged its pursuit:

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Re: The Happiness of Pursuit
« Reply #4 on: June 14, 2012, 02:48:01 AM »
"The focus on the pursuit of happiness, endorsed by the Declaration of Independence, fits well with the idea of life as a journey — a bright thread that runs through the literary cannon of the collective human culture. With the world at your feet, the turns that you should take along the way depend on what you are at the outset and on what you become as the journey lengthens. Accordingly, the present book is an attempt to understand, in a deeper sense than merely metaphorical, what it means to be human and how humans are shaped by the journey thorough this world, which the poet John Keats called ‘the vale of soul-making’ — in particular, how it puts within the soul’s reach ‘a bliss peculiar to each one’s individual existence."

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Re: The Happiness of Pursuit
« Reply #5 on: June 14, 2012, 02:49:11 AM »
Though much of the book is rooted in scientific inquiry and research, Edelman begins with a disclaimer against the classical conception of science, one that echoes this beautiful recent definition of science as “systematic wonder”:

"According to one popular conception of science that goes all the way back to Francis Bacon’s invention of it in 1620, scientific endeavor is all about getting answers from nature. That said, given the quality of answers one gets depends conspicuously on the quality of the questions one asks, scientific inquiries lacking in intrepidity, imagination, and insight are likely to yield little more than scientifically validated tedium."

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Re: The Happiness of Pursuit
« Reply #6 on: June 14, 2012, 02:50:02 AM »
Edelman goes on to explore “three things everyone should know about life, the universe, and everything.” (Cue in Neil deGrasse Tyson on the most important thing to know about the universe.) The first has to do with the arrow of time and the idea that the universe is built around an asymmetry between the past and the future, governed by the basic laws of physics. The second hinges on the predicament of being alive and the awareness that “life is fragile and time is irreversible,” and that terrible things can happen in a flash, leaving us unable to undo them, but we can anticipate and try to prevent them through insights from our past experience. From these two follows the third fact: that the future is predictable from the past, but only up to a point.

"The reason for this predictability is the sheer physical inertia of the universe. On an appropriately short time scale, things are guaranteed to stay as they are or to carry on changing in the same manner as they did before. There are also many kinds of long-term regularities, such as cycles of seasons. Animals can evolve to rely upon seasonal changes n the environment and to anticipate them from telltale cues (think of migratory birds that respond to the first frost.) Or, animals can evolve sophisticated brains that represent patterns of change in the environment and anticipate the future by treating it as a statistically projected extension of the past. Either way, it is the capacity for forethought that distinguishes, on the average, between the quick and the dead."

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Re: The Happiness of Pursuit
« Reply #7 on: June 14, 2012, 02:51:21 AM »
Forethought, in fact — the distillation of experience using statistical inference — plays a large part in how the brain computes mind, and computation is a central element of cognition. The best way to understand the building blocks of the mind, from perception to action, Edelman argues, is by considering them as a web of interlinked computations:

"Computationally… the unfolding of behavior can be thought of as a ball rolling down a continually shifting landscape of possibilities, always seeking the deepest valleys. This computational understanding of the nature of perception, motivation, and action offers some intriguing insights into the meaning of, and the prospects for, the pursuit of happiness."

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Re: The Happiness of Pursuit
« Reply #8 on: June 14, 2012, 02:52:48 AM »
Of particular note is this discussion of the function and nature of memory, something we’ve previously explored:

"Far from being a mere repository for odd pieces of information, your memory is charged with relating the episodes of your life to each other, seeking recurring patterns — crisscrossing paths that run through the space of possible perceptions, motivations, and actions.

"Because of its likely evolutionary roots in way-finding, episodic memory relies heavily on taking note of locations in which events happen and of their spatial relationship, turning a representation of the layout of the physical environment into a foundation for the abstract space of patterns and possibilities that it constructs over the mind’s lifetime. As they fall into place the paths through the possibility space can support mental travel in space and time, which are both simulated to the best of the mind’s knowledge and ability. Episodic memory is thus the mind’s personal space0time machine — a perfect vehicle for scouting for and harvesting happiness."

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Re: The Happiness of Pursuit
« Reply #9 on: June 14, 2012, 02:54:01 AM »
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Re: The Happiness of Pursuit
« Reply #10 on: June 16, 2012, 08:51:22 AM »
Interesting. I'll check this out.

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Re: The Happiness of Pursuit
« Reply #11 on: June 21, 2012, 11:48:50 PM »
"Far from being a mere repository for odd pieces of information, your memory is charged with relating the episodes of your life to each other, seeking recurring patterns — crisscrossing paths that run through the space of possible perceptions, motivations, and actions.

hehe, some russian named ivan petrovich pavlov simplified this with his dog. ;D

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Re: The Happiness of Pursuit
« Reply #12 on: June 25, 2012, 10:47:01 AM »
hehe, some russian named ivan petrovich pavlov simplified this with his dog. ;D

Hmm, what happened to the dog? ::)

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Re: The Happiness of Pursuit
« Reply #13 on: June 26, 2012, 09:02:42 AM »
Republic Act 8485 (Animal Welfare Act of 1998, Philippines), as amended and strengthened by House  Bill 6893 of 2013--- violation means a maximum of P250,000 fine with a corresponding three-year jail term and a minimum of P30,000 fine and six months imprisonment

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Re: The Happiness of Pursuit
« Reply #14 on: June 26, 2012, 09:03:23 AM »
just you wait till he becomes a tb member... ;D

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Re: The Happiness of Pursuit
« Reply #15 on: August 02, 2012, 08:52:08 PM »
the dog became a scientist. ;D

A salivating scientist? ;D

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Re: The Happiness of Pursuit
« Reply #16 on: August 02, 2012, 08:52:32 PM »
just you wait till he becomes a tb member... ;D

Di ba diay dugay nang member? ;D

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