Hunger, Thirst, and Sickness: Wellbeing Part 2

In the first post, I identified a state of wellbeing as being my ultimate purpose and what I believe humanity’s ultimate purpose should be.  Before I write further posts about how to achieve this goal, I’m first going to delve deeper into the nature ofwellbeing .  To do this, I’m going to employ my version of probabilistic thinking because I think it will help us better approximate the nature ofwellbeing.

What is probabilistic thinking?  It’s a way of looking at the world that recognizes its inherent uncertainty and attempts to find meaning despite this.  So for instance, anyone who’s ever taken a philosophy class (or seen The Matrix) will have been left with an awareness of the uncertainty of perception (optical illusions are often used to demonstrate this).  “How do I know if what I’m looking at is really there?” you’re taught to ask and the answer your given is that you can’t know for certain.  Yet you still have certain objectives you want to accomplish, and if you felt completely uncertain about everything you saw, it’d be very difficult to make your way in the world.  The way you reconcile perceptive uncertainty with a desire to accomplish goals is to use probabilistic thinking.  You make some best guess assessment as to the probability that what you see if really the way youperceive it–I personally figure there’s a ~99.9% probability that I’m seeing things in a way that is ~99.9% close to how they really are.  For me, 99.9% is close enough to certain that I feel comfortable acting as though I’m certain that the computer I’m looking at now isn’t just an illusion, but I also keep in the back of my mind that I am not totally certain of this.

So, to apply this to wellbeing, I want to find the states of being that have a high probability of causing high wellbeing when they’re present and low wellbeing when they are not.  To help me with this, I look to evolution and examine its probable role in our wellbeing.  It seems very likely that evolution has tied wellbeing with states critical to survival.  A species which took pleasure in self destruction would seek self destruction and thus not pass on its genes and thrive; conversely, a species that suffered when it was being harmed would avoid harm and thus likely thrive.  This leads me to the conclusion that hunger, thirst, and sickness will take awaywellbeing while satiation (of hunger and thirst) and health will add to wellbeing .  To further confirm this, I know that this is the case for me and that most of the world also considers hunger, thirst and sickness to contribute to suffering and tries to stop them.

Based on this, I’m not going to say that I’m certain that hunger, thirst and sickness are bad things and that, in every case, they should be fought.  Rather, I say that there is a high probability that hunger, thirst, and sickness take away fromwellbeing in a high percentage of the population and, since my goal is to increase wellbeing, I’m going to and others should fight these things.

Final thoughts:  It’s uncomfortable to make decisions based on uncertain views of the world. However, there’s no way to not act, not make decisions.  Therefore, we either act to help something, to fight it, or to ignore it and which decision we make should be guided by the best guess we can come up with.

Also, the process I went through to come up with my best guess about what causes wellbeing and what takes away from it was very, VERY rough.  When we’re talking about the lives of people, I don’t think it’s acceptable to allow our estimates to remain this rough.  For the timebeing, please call me out if you think that I’ve made a guess that’s too rough or just wrong.  Eventually, let’s come up with a better way for making these assessments.

Finally, I know it might seem like I’m sitting in my western bubble ivory tower and dictating what is good for the rest of the world.  I guess in a way that’s true; in this instance I’m trying to determine universal sources of human wellbeing.  However, I also believe a lot in the idea that many forms of wellbeing come from WILDLY different states of being and that there is NOT one path to happiness.  Ultimately I believe that people become happiest when they spend a lot of time reflecting on what makes them happy and then are allowed to (your parents let you drive) and enabled to (your parents give you a car) seek out whatever they’ve determined will make them happiest.  I just ultimately think that most people, when thusly enabled, will avoid hunger, thirst and sickness and so society should seek first to allow people to choose not to exist in those states.