I don’t think I follow your post. One idea is that happiness functions like sound, where it takes twice as much of an increase in sound to cause the same increase in perceived loudness. This seems confused if we extend it to happiness. What are we supposed to say: it takes twice as much of increase in happiness to cause the same increase in perceived happiness? That would be crazy, because we only have one item, happiness, rather than two. If we labelled this on a graph, the axis would be the same.
An alternative is that it takes twice as much of an increase in brain activity (of a certain kind) to cause the same increase in perceived happiness. Okay. But people are reported their perceived happiness (or life satisfaction), not the brain states.
Imagine, for example, there exist some “S1 happiness” which is actually important for humans, and they are making decisions based on it, and some “S2 perception of happiness” which people report. People are incorrectly assuming (a) this is the same, and (b) you have good introspective access to it.
For more direct comparison than sound, imagine there isn’t such thing as money, and you ask people to report their percieved wealth on a scale 1 to 10. Now introduce money, and compare how the 1..10 rating relate to monetary wealth. I would bet you would get nonlinear relationship in this case.
Hello Jan.
I don’t think I follow your post. One idea is that happiness functions like sound, where it takes twice as much of an increase in sound to cause the same increase in perceived loudness. This seems confused if we extend it to happiness. What are we supposed to say: it takes twice as much of increase in happiness to cause the same increase in perceived happiness? That would be crazy, because we only have one item, happiness, rather than two. If we labelled this on a graph, the axis would be the same.
An alternative is that it takes twice as much of an increase in brain activity (of a certain kind) to cause the same increase in perceived happiness. Okay. But people are reported their perceived happiness (or life satisfaction), not the brain states.
Imagine, for example, there exist some “S1 happiness” which is actually important for humans, and they are making decisions based on it, and some “S2 perception of happiness” which people report. People are incorrectly assuming (a) this is the same, and (b) you have good introspective access to it.
For more direct comparison than sound, imagine there isn’t such thing as money, and you ask people to report their percieved wealth on a scale 1 to 10. Now introduce money, and compare how the 1..10 rating relate to monetary wealth. I would bet you would get nonlinear relationship in this case.