Can't measuer love , emotions etc? Wrong!

[reznwerks]

"When people think of "science," they naturally think of atoms, planets, robots  things they can touch and see. They know that subjective experiences such as happiness are important, but they believe that such experiences can't be studied scientifically. That belief is dead wrong."


http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gilbert ... index.html

 

[Featherbop]

I didn't know that anyone objects to love, happiness and the like being scientifically studied. I am aware that there are those that do not think that those things can be fully comprehended, however.

The article makes several good points, but I dought it's assumptions regarding people's thoughts about love and happiness. I thought most people believed happiness is the ultimate goal. I thought most people wanted to predict their future happiness. I thought most people believed that only one kind of happiness exists. Those are my views, and I must have wrongly assumed these things were almost universally agreed upon, if the article is correct, that is.

 

[Drew]

While it is indeed possible to measure subjective experiences, there indeed exists a very important distinction between the world of subjective experience (my taste experiences, my visual sensations, my emotions) and the "public" world of the objective.

Consider the atom. The atom is a conceptual construct that usefully describes our world. The entire content of this concept is "public" and objective. There is nothing about the content of the concept of the atom that is not "public" - when we inquire after any "subjective" (in the sense of the question of there existing a "subject who experiences") element in relation to the atom, we must confess that there is simply zero subjective content.

The situation is fundamentally different in relation to subjective states like happiness or the taste of orange juice. While these states may be publically measurable in an objective way, the content of these states is definitely not exhausted by such a characterization. There is something left over, something inaccessible to public scrutiny.

In short, when someone whacks me on the knee with a bat, there is an experiential component that is totally private and utterly inaccessible to others. True, my pain can be measured, but there is a subjective aspect that cannot be acccessed. There exists a vital conceptual distinction between the measurement of a subjective state and the content of that subjective state.

If Mary is born in, and never leaves, a room that only contains black, white, and grey objects, she will never have a full grasp of the content of the concept of colour. She can read books about the spectrum of colours and she may understand how each wavelength corresponds to a different colour, but she will never have complete visibility into "what colour is" until she is let out of the room and experiences a blue sky for the first time.

 

[Stratavaria]

Bottom line this is a bunch of quack scientist with an overtly needy urge to measure anything which has failed in process or has not yet been attempted, they are providiing self conjuring purpose.

 

[ArtGuy]

I notice that the author's comparison between happiness and vision testing is flawed, for a couple of reasons. First of all, he's comparing absolutes and relatives. A person can say, "This is clearer than that." He cannot say, "These glasses provide me with 36 oculars worth of visual clarity." The study seems to be relying on the latter type of classifications for its data.

Secondly, and more importantly, when you're being shown all these different sheets full of Es and Os, you're being told to make a comparison between two events only a few seconds apart. If you were given a pair of glasses then taken them off, and then donned a second pair a week later, it would be impossible to accurately compare them unless the differences were pretty stark.

The latter problem, in particular, is going to bite these researchers in the butt. Sure, you can deduce with reasonable certainty that someone derived more happiness from his wedding than from getting his toe ripped off in an accident. But was he happier at his wedding or at the birth of his child? Was he made more unhappy by the passing of his father, or by the passing of his mother? It's going to be a tough call.

And this is coupled, ironically, with research that has already been done showing that people are absolutely horrible at accurately recalling their own emotional experiences. Memories tend to get overwritten by popular notions of what people feel they should be (a crappy wedding may be replaced with a memory of something that was "the happiest day of my life", because, well, that's what it should have been), extremely negative experiences are made less negative as a coping method, and so on.

All of this isn't to say that its impossible to study happiness, of course. But we need to be more careful than these researchers appear to be, and everything should be taken with a grain of salt. Psychology is a far cry from physics.