Let’s suppose a machine existed that could offer us any experience we desired. Any experience. Let’s imagine distinguished neuroscientists stimulated our brain so we could think and feel our fantasies, as though these were real. Define your fantastical world view, dear reader; neuroscientists will make all dreams that make you happy possible -your entire life… But under one condition: to be floating in a tank connected to electrodes to your brain, making it able for you to “live” the perfect life simulation.  Two questions:

• Would you hook up to this supermachine preprogrammed with all your aspirations and fantasies for the rest of your life?

• In fact, I ask: is there something more important in life than being happy?

Philosopher Robert Nozick created this experiment in 1974; and he concluded that the answer to the first question is: “NO” and to the second: “THERE ARE A LOT OF THINGS THAT MATTER MORE THAN BEING HAPPY.”

Simple dilemma: what’s preferable, a simulated life full of pleasure and happiness or a real life marked by diverse hopeless, hopeful, happy, loving, unloving, disillusion, partial success and unfulfilled dreams experiences?

Despite the attractiveness and seduction of “being happy one’s entire life”, lots of us prefer life in its plain existence (highs and lows), instead of happiness under electrodes.

Real, complex, life, is a purpose in itself. We want to do and experiment, not just feel pleasure in doing it. Without a doubt, not all of us are alike. Not everyone thinks like Nozick or yours truly. There are lots of people that connect their lives to “substitute electrodes”. They ingest drugs that affect their brain’s biochemistry; they assume religions that act as placebos to counteract the anxiety that brings forth a meaning of death (or a meaning of life).  Or, more commonly yet, they “live on autopilot” their hours of everyday living, so as not to feel the depth and complexity of life.

  To those of us that renounce the “virtual   happiness tank”, fullness (happiness) has to   connect with an intention to think, feel what is   thought, think what is felt. In brief: taking   conscience that the purpose of life is a life with   purpose.  Purpose implies being alive. Being   alive entails living an examined life.

Therapists – from masseuses to stylists, pseudo-psychologists and personal coaches – maintain a false belief that people have to feel good with and about themselves all the time; a notion that socio-biologic science finds fatally unreal.  We all have mishaps, bad days, difficult periods and “bad luck” days.

Any masseuse, makeup artist, soccer player or florist can be an authority to give therapy to those in need. Our search for a sense of immediate happiness and the frailness of our human nature make sense of nonsense without psychological sense stemming from therapy. This is what life’s meaning and understanding of the psyche have fallen into.

Optimist psychology sustains that one lives better by enthusiasm than by pessimism (obvious?). But, how much do we cheat ourselves with the vision that it’s all in our mind and nothing exists.

The relevance, often, is one that the easy road to happiness doesn’t bring about. More so, happiness for neuroscience is not the end of the road, but the road itself. 

Published in Opinión y Análisis
El Universal
Febraury 7^th, 2009