How to be happy?

Peace is the fundation of our happiness.

What is peace? It is a psychological state in which we are freed from all worries and frustrations in our pursuit of future projections, like a relaxing tune can help us fall asleep or work more efficiently. We will simply call it “peace” from here on.

With our projective intelligence, “reality” becomes highly hypothetical, even more dream-like than dreams. In dreams we fall back to general intelligence and behave like animals. We do not look too far ahead and have very limited past recollections. Our actions are mainly dictated by our skills, impulses and instincts. We experience our dreams moment by moment and our emotions fluctuate accordingly. In contrast, in our conscious lives we constantly carry numerous long term and short term projections and “momentary experiences” are being unproportionally stretched. So much so that our momentary experiences are preoccupied by the projective contents on our minds, the HERE and NOW becomes more projection-dependent than sensation-dependent. It is a common experience that the most pleasant stimulus would become an nuisance when we are upset. Yet, the lover with a rose under the pouring rain always carries a smile.

If we want to be happy NOW, we need to “project” beyond.

Our capacity for emotions is a product of millions of years of striving to stay alive, a self-rewarding mechanism that guides us to make favourable choices. As a result, we are all seekers of happiness. Whatever we do, we do it for happiness. Even the most self-sacrificing act is driven by personal gratifications.

There are basically two mode of happiness: peace and excitement, including physical and fanciful excitements. If the happiness is brief, it is an excitement and we simply move no to project more. There is no such thing as prolonged happiness. Happiness when prolonged will inevitably and swiftly fade out, and the presence of faith will determine what would remain. If we have faith that it will recur, it becomes a source of peace, e.g. friendships. If we have no faith in its recurrence, it will be a painful reminder of what is gone for good, e.g. divorce. However, if we can pacify our sense of loss, it can become a source of peace again, e.g. childhood. There is no prolonged happiness but unpacified psychological pain CAN last and WILL. A traumatic experience is an haunting torture which disturbs the foundation of the victim’s peace, e.g. loss of significant relationships. It is so painful because it makes it impossible for the victim to fantasize a happy future.

Nothing is more horrible than not being able to fantasize. Raising children is so gratifying because it extends the lifespan and scope of our fantasies. Not only that we can fantasize beyond our own deaths, we also gain a second chance to fantasize for our children the things we failed, or succeeded. To fantasize, we demand peace. Our need for peace is proportion to our craving for fantasies, like the depth of foundation to the height of a building. Peace is reservation in nature. Excess possession is a peace-seeking activity unique to humans because only we can project so much and so far beyond. We all strive to make more money than we spend, otherwise we would feel insecure, won’t we? It is a sad but common picture that we all had worked hard for our families when we were poorer, but found ourselves too busy to spend time with them when are richer. When we are too carry away by our fantasies, we will often neglect the sources of our peace and find ourselves in deep regret after they are gone- often suddenly. “Taking things for granted” is therefore a common (but not necessary) price we pay for our fantasies.

Happiness is as illusive as our hypothetical projections. It has a cloud-like property, that you can identify it from afar but does not notice it from within. This cloud-like nature is caused by the invasion of projections into our momentary experiences. We are so projection-dependent that projections themselves can be more rewarding than the actual outcome. The joy of shopping is a good example. We fantasize that our lives would be nicer if we had the merchandise in possession. This excitement will fade with the act of payment and many of these merchandises often end up not utilized. The craving for possession can be more delightful than the actual possession indeed. Likewise, courtship unleashes our most romantic fantasies which are very unlikely to come true. “Falling” in love is always much more gratifying than “fallen” in love. Nobody has done anything wrong when we found our passions gone with our steady relationships. Successful relationships are prolonged happiness and therefore can only be “peaceful” instead of “fanciful”.

What is human intelligence?

Human intelligence has outgrew our environmental challenges, like the tails of peacocks. Intelligence is common in Nature. It can be define as the behavioural tactics which aim at gaining survival advantages against the competition. As a rule of thumb, we can compare the intellectual level of a species by the probability of mutative behaviours (excluding genetic mutations) under the same matrix of stimulus. The more spontaneous behavioural deviations observed among individuals, the more intellectual the species is. Human intelligence is simply an extension of such intelligence marked by its outstanding capability of making hypothetical projections into the future which in turns enhances the diversity of our behavioural responses. We will call it projective intelligence, in contrast to general intelligence.

All forms of life including viruses acquired different levels of intelligence. Since we have no way of studying non-human consciousness yet, we will put aside the issue of whether these behaviours are conscious or not. Intelligence can be understood as a mechanism which takes in sensations and memories and yields behaviours and more memories. The resulting behaviours must distinguished from Reflexive behaviours which are instinctual, not intellectual. General intelligence inevitably involves a different degree of anticipation of the future. Fight or flight decision-making is a primitive intellectual behaviour which entails an assessment of the “potential” danger encountered. Linguistic abilities were evolved to communicate ,and even preserve, these projections within a community or a species. e.g. bees dance to communicate food source and primates cry to warn incoming threats. The level of linguistic complexity of a species is therefore a very good indicator of its level of intellectual and social sophistication.

For humans, the initial manifestation of intelligence was just a matter of better ambush strategies or better hunting tools, like what we can still find in other primates today. However, for some divine or natural reasons, our projective capacity has grown unproportionally and became so abstractly hypothetical that our intellect can process hypothetical projections in infinite loops, instead of depending on sensations and memories alone. The Game theory is the best example to demonstrate this amazing power of our projective capabilities – what would you do if you knew they knew what you knew that they knew….. Evidently, not other species on Earth could comprehend the complexity involved, let alone solving it with mathematical equations! It has been proven beyond any doubt that primates can manage to communicate symbolically, but it remains that they cannot project as far and abstract as we do. Linguistic capability is driven by the intellectual capacity, not vice versa. The difference between projective intelligence and general intelligence is sheer “intellectual”, not genetic or biological. It is a matter of “how”, not “what”; software instead of hardware. Just like there is no physical evidence to justify the differences between running Linux and Windows on the same PC, neither can we find any distinctive “human” genes in our DNA. Recent studies has found that the RNA is what makes the difference between similar branch of species. RNA is not the building blocks, it is the program to control how DNA data are used, like the same Lego bricks can build endless toys.

With the evolution of our projective intelligence, our linguistic capabilities also co-developed into a complex system of artificial symbols and concepts that allow us to envision a shared hypothetical future and to preserve technology more effectively within a community. The power of Einstein’s thought experiments is no independent act of genius. Instead, it is a fruitful harvest from millions of years of coping with hypothetical situations ever since our ancestors emerged. With this unique capability, we gradually became the supreme ruler on Earth.

Like in the game theory, something perplexing happened when we turn this projective intelligence inward. “I think therefore I am” is also “I think therefore I worry”. The more future-conscious we become, the more we worry. All animals share the instinctive fear for harm, but humans also fear for death and our own wildest intangible projections. Fear for harm is a defence mechanism which triggers a fight or flight decision. Worries are hypothetical and no tangible things can really pacify them. It takes faith. We will remain restless until we can find “peace” by faith. Manic-depressive patients are typical victims of their own unpacified projections. Peace is the worry-killer which enable us to project positively.