2020-09-20

TL;DR: Permanent happiness can never be achieved, or at least that it’d be a bad from a designer’s point of view. This section goes more into some mechanisms a designer might want to put into an organism. This is then used to explain why we can never have enough Closet Space.

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If I ever say to the moment:
Stay! You are so beautiful!
Then you may throw me into chains,
and I’ll happily go to the abyss!
–Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (from Faust, 1808)

How much money is enough? Just a little bit more.
–John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937)

The player with the most successful rabbits probably won’t have the happiest rabbits. We’d want our rabbits to be constantly moving forward. We’d want them to only have enough glimpses of happiness or contentment that they don’t give up completely. This is how it is with human nature, and it’s this way for a good evolutionary reason.

An analogy might be made to walking. When roboticists first began to make robots that could walk, they focused on stability. If a walking robot froze in its tracks it would be stable in the sense that it wouldn’t fall down. Because of this stability, it could walk as slowly as you wanted it to. This is contrasted to the gallop of a horse. When a horse runs, there are instances when all 4 hooves are in the air at the same time. Thus, a horse can’t gallop in “slow motion” because it can’t be suspended with all its feet in the air at the same time. The normal walking gait of people isn’t stable either. During each step, our center of mass moves to its highest point when it is in front of the foot that’s on the ground. So, we begin to fall forward, but our other foot rushes forward to catch us. We then raise our center of mass and “reset” the system for the next step. So walking is falling and catching (or “controlled falling”), and you’re never in a permanent stable state.

Likewise, one way of getting our rabbits to reproduce is to have them built such that they’re always on the edge: that they always feel like if they do just this next goal, they’ll be happy. When they do accomplish the next goal, they get some reward, but not permanent happiness. We don’t want our rabbits ever to be content because content rabbits don’t reproduce as much as those that are constantly striving. So our rabbits will never actually attain fulfillment. To do so would mean that the rabbits stop striving for more and stop reproducing. On the other hand, the rabbits’ reward structure should be such that they don’t give up either, because that would mean an end of reproduction too.

If I were designing people to reproduce (or gain power or help their offspring to reproduce), I’d also structure their reward system such that they’re always trying to attain something. Like a moving carrot, I might also make them believe that if they only achieve this or that goal, they’ll be happy. When they finally catch the carrot, I’ll give them momentary happiness, but I’d structure them such that this happiness would fade after some time and they’d devise a new goal.

So, it’s possible that we can only distract ourselves from the feeling that might be described as emptiness or disquiet, that the emptiness can’t be banished, only put off. For example, in Anna Karenina, the character Levin is happiest when he’s mowing hay with a scythe. It’s a simple action, but he’s making “progress” on something.

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In some video games “cheat codes” or “god” mode (where your character is invincible) makes the game boring quickly. Likewise, suppose you found a genie who would grant as many wishes as you wanted. The wishes couldn’t be contradictory or too poorly specified. For example, the wish for “permanent happiness” wouldn’t be granted on the grounds that it’s too vague. With this genie you could make it such that the world was at peace, famine and disease were gone, you had eternal life, money was virtually meaningless, you had all the women you could imagine, and your friends, family and power were limitless. But, would you ever be happy? Can you imagine a situation where you don’t have any more wishes to make?

I suspect that there’d never be a permanent situation where a person was satisfied. I suspect that (via evolution) the human reward system is structured such that permanent happiness is impossible. For people (or any evolutionary being), it’d make more sense if happiness was the event of going to a better situation¹.

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If we want to win at Hare Wars, we’d also want our rabbits to use up all of their resources. We’d want them to be greedy and lazy. Laziness encourages efficiency. There should be some drive for our rabbits to try to find more efficient ways of accomplishing things, or ways of reducing their own effort. Because if they can do something with half the effort, they can do twice as much.

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Why would we want our rabbits to exhaust their resources? Consider what happens if a single pair of mice get into a stocked granary and go unchecked. They’ll reproduce until there are thousands and thousands of mice and all the grain is gone… at which point almost all of the mice will starve to death. But any mouse with a long view who exercised some constraint in converting the grain into more mice would soon find himself outnumbered by mice who don’t have this constraint. The unconstrained mouse would find himself locally successful. By this, I mean the mouse will outperform (i.e., out-reproduce) any other single mouse that doesn’t use all of its resources. The problem is that a group of mice that exercises some constraint in managing their resources can do better in the long run than a group of short-sited mice.

There’s almost always some bottleneck resource in nature though. Nature is an arms race, in a sense. For example, plants develop mechanisms, such as poisons, to prevent themselves from being eaten by animals, and animals develop means (such as enzymes) to get around those mechanisms. Usually, each party is just barely in front or behind the other, and this prevents either from completely dominating the other, unlike the mice in the granary.

For most of our evolution, it was a rare thing to have a virtually unlimited supply of fatty foods. Thus, because there was an external constraint on the amount of bacon we could eat (i.e., its limited supply) there was no need to have an internal mechanism that limited our intake of bacon.