Monday, August 1, 2011
A Summary of "The riddle of experience vs. memory"
Nowadays, a lot of people think about happiness. Everybody tries to make people as happy as possible; however, in spite of many efforts, sometimes it's really hard. That's because of traps. There are three main cognitive traps: a reluctance to admit complexity, a confusion between experience and memory, and the focusing illusion. When people think about happiness, people don't refer to their experience but memory. Even if a person had good time for long time, if he/she had bad feeling in the end, the whole memory changes to bad memory; eventually he/she can't feel happy. We have both experiencing self and remembering self. The biggest difference is how to handle time. As some examples show us, remembering self is much more important than experiencing self. People shouldn't think about happiness as a substitute of well-being; because those ideas are completely different.
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I remember my high school teacher; she was an awful teacher, and nobody liked her. However, at the end, she changed her behavior and played nice to students, and many of us remember her as a good teacher!
ReplyDeleteIs that true, Kia? I think I had a very good teacher in my junior high, and he was kind except once he got very very angry at me, and since then, I think he is very scary. But Chieu, this is a good summary!
ReplyDeleteGood, Chieu! The talk, then, was about how people make mistakes when considering happiness because they don't realize that different aspects of who we are (the remembering self and the experiencing self) require different things to be happy. As you pointed out, the word has, in the opinion of the speaker, become used for too many different situations.
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