Excellent article. My parents both passed away in their mid 90’s. Judging the value of their lives, based on what they were feeling, or even remembering, in the last few years or months of their lives would grossly underestimate the joy, utility and value of their lives. Yet it is those last months we most remember. It’s so important to try to step back. And yet if we do, we often may forget the pain and the bad times. Perhaps the best way, although maybe not the most honest way, is to focus on the positive and eliminate the negative, even though in so doing we avoid some of the true pain.
Same David, both my parents passed in their 90s just this year and this experience of memorializing the end seems to counter this principle but at least for me it wasn’t just the end but the long tail of the last few years that ground me down. But in remembering and memorializing them i realized the importance of - and excuse the trite words - ‘celebration of life’ looking at the totality of a life well lived
That's truly cognitive wonderland, thanks so much for your reflection, Tommy.
Evaluating life phases or individual experiences based on how good they felt or whether the outcomes were more positive than negative, seems rather short-sighted to me.
Many experiences are deeply tied to our values. Sometimes we choose a path that is painful in the moment or brings uncomfortable consequences, but the decision itself was made in alignment with our values, which strengthens both the individual and the people around them—regardless of the consequences.
So, in the end, even pain can hold a certain kind of joy, or at least bring inner strength and peace.
Has the peak-end effect been widely replicated? Or maybe I'm remembering wrong that Dan Ariely did a lot of Ted Talks about this 10 + years ago. We have since found out he committed academic fraud.
I wish someone did an update on all the things that turned out to be fraud so I don't have to worry about every single morsel of information in my brain (how they would tailor that for me, specifically, I don't know, but it would be nice).
Yeah Ariely's work isn't trustworthy and he did some work in this area, but the foundational studies were done by others (Kahneman in particular) and it's been replicated in a lot of different labs and different settings.
I think you nailed it Tommy! No, we’re not to be trusted regarding what’s best for us. But then in saying that, we’re also theorizing what actually is best for us, though in a theoretical capacity that’s beyond any given person or society. There needn’t be a contradiction here because instead of mere personal musings, here we’re theorizing what’s good in an ultimate capacity. The theory is that we’re all instantaneous selves and so value exists in the moment.
If true then why does our existence feel continuous? You’ve mentioned memory of the past. This bonds us with the people that we used to be — pride regarding the past makes us feel good presently and embarrassment regarding the past makes us feel bad presently, for two examples. If we lose our memory of the past then we also lose our bond with the people we used to be.
The interesting thing that you didn’t get into is what bonds us with the people we might become? Here there is the feel good component of “hope”, as well as the feel bad component of “worry”. Some things seem hopeful to us, and the associated present good feelings can cause us to invest in realizing those ends. Maybe running a marathon doesn’t always feel good in itself, though the general hope of being a marathoner tends to get these athletes through? Then on the other side, worry makes us feel bad presently and this gives us incentive to do things that diminish that worry. We tend to pay our bills given the present worry of what would otherwise happen.
As a parent I think I know what you wanted to say to that anesthesiologist. “Just as me smacking you in the face and giving you a drug to not remember getting smacked in the face by me wouldn’t right things, I will not assert that a drug which makes my child forget past pain, means that those pains were anything less than what they were”.
Interesting you bring it up, Loewenstein connected this sort of difference between the "experiencing self" and "deciding self" to this sort of decisions about undertaking difficult things like mountain-climbing. It's been a while since I read it, but I remember it being insightful: https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sds/docs/loewenstein/mountaineering.pdf
Thanks Tommy, that paper is quite relevant. Not only is it supportive of my general ideological stance, but it seems like it may have subliminally helped support your post here. I guess what’s interesting to me is that Loewenstein is hoping for behavior economists like himself to take their utility theory beyond just consumption, and even though economics is already founded upon that general utility maximization premise (which yes, may sometimes be difficult to measure). This premise is why I think economists have been able to developed a wide assortment of effective models. Conversely the more basic behavioral science of psychology has no such generally acknowledged foundation, and so to me its dearth of effective modeling seems appropriate. Could my above simple reduction that we’re all instantaneous pleasure seekers bonded with the past through memory, and the future through hope and worry, help the science of psychology harden up to develop models that are similarly effective? I suspect so.
Since Mathew considers consciousness irreconcilable with a causal world by means of mere epistemological dynamics such as “Mary’s room”, we might observe the assertion of one prominent (and faithful) medieval person. William of Occam asserted that faith cannot be reconciled with reason. This is to say that a metaphysical boundary exists between the two varieties of explanation. I agree! So I’m not a naturalist given mere empirical observations, but rather for convenience. Because science should otherwise be rendered obsolete, I choose potentially explorable reason over supernatural faith. Here there’s nothing left to argue about.
Regarding your final questions, another would be to ask something quite Canadian. It seems causally logical that Krista and Tatiana Hogan are the only two known humans able to partly share their subjective experience, and this is because of how they strangely also share a thalamus. Beyond such unusual shared brain function being associated with shared subjectivity, what would a dualist interpretation of their situation be?
Great article. Reminds me of a rule of screenwriting: the most important 10 minutes of a screenplay are the beginning: they'll determine whether the reader will keep reading or not. The most important 10 minutes of the resulting movie are the end: they'll determine whether the audience remembers it or not.
Nice discussion here Tommy While many of us here on Substack (I include just about everything I have written in Risk & Progress in this category also) assume that humans act in rational ways. We don’t.
Human beings are highly irrational as the examples here demonstrate.
Very interesting article, and some great reflections! Though I don't think this sort of point poses much of a threat to a utilitarian judgement of life. After all, remembering an experience is just as much an experience as the experience itself, and so it seems like we should just judge the value accordingly: the value of the memory is in the value of having the memory. Likewise, the value of the experience is in the value of having the experience, regardless of how you remember it. In other words, an experience cannot be made retrospectively worse.
This of course doesn't mean that making good memories doesn't have value--having good memories is a good thing after all.
I think the same sort of thing can also be said for non-hedonic goods. For example, there might be non-hedonic value in having real relationships with real people, but the value of the relationship cannot be made greater or lesser by how you remember it, but there is still value in having good memories of a relationship.
To your comment: Sure. But I think there never being a time when you have access to the value of all of those moments makes it difficult to judge what is or was best.
Came for the Butts, stayed for the content. I have discussed this phenomenon with my wife - without it we wouldn’t have had a 2nd kid 😬
Excellent article. My parents both passed away in their mid 90’s. Judging the value of their lives, based on what they were feeling, or even remembering, in the last few years or months of their lives would grossly underestimate the joy, utility and value of their lives. Yet it is those last months we most remember. It’s so important to try to step back. And yet if we do, we often may forget the pain and the bad times. Perhaps the best way, although maybe not the most honest way, is to focus on the positive and eliminate the negative, even though in so doing we avoid some of the true pain.
Same David, both my parents passed in their 90s just this year and this experience of memorializing the end seems to counter this principle but at least for me it wasn’t just the end but the long tail of the last few years that ground me down. But in remembering and memorializing them i realized the importance of - and excuse the trite words - ‘celebration of life’ looking at the totality of a life well lived
That's truly cognitive wonderland, thanks so much for your reflection, Tommy.
Evaluating life phases or individual experiences based on how good they felt or whether the outcomes were more positive than negative, seems rather short-sighted to me.
Many experiences are deeply tied to our values. Sometimes we choose a path that is painful in the moment or brings uncomfortable consequences, but the decision itself was made in alignment with our values, which strengthens both the individual and the people around them—regardless of the consequences.
So, in the end, even pain can hold a certain kind of joy, or at least bring inner strength and peace.
Has the peak-end effect been widely replicated? Or maybe I'm remembering wrong that Dan Ariely did a lot of Ted Talks about this 10 + years ago. We have since found out he committed academic fraud.
I wish someone did an update on all the things that turned out to be fraud so I don't have to worry about every single morsel of information in my brain (how they would tailor that for me, specifically, I don't know, but it would be nice).
Yeah Ariely's work isn't trustworthy and he did some work in this area, but the foundational studies were done by others (Kahneman in particular) and it's been replicated in a lot of different labs and different settings.
I can personally vouch for the first author of this study on peak-end, though he's a bit of a weirdo: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027713002308
This Blanchard fellow seems to do a lot of monkeying around.
I think you nailed it Tommy! No, we’re not to be trusted regarding what’s best for us. But then in saying that, we’re also theorizing what actually is best for us, though in a theoretical capacity that’s beyond any given person or society. There needn’t be a contradiction here because instead of mere personal musings, here we’re theorizing what’s good in an ultimate capacity. The theory is that we’re all instantaneous selves and so value exists in the moment.
If true then why does our existence feel continuous? You’ve mentioned memory of the past. This bonds us with the people that we used to be — pride regarding the past makes us feel good presently and embarrassment regarding the past makes us feel bad presently, for two examples. If we lose our memory of the past then we also lose our bond with the people we used to be.
The interesting thing that you didn’t get into is what bonds us with the people we might become? Here there is the feel good component of “hope”, as well as the feel bad component of “worry”. Some things seem hopeful to us, and the associated present good feelings can cause us to invest in realizing those ends. Maybe running a marathon doesn’t always feel good in itself, though the general hope of being a marathoner tends to get these athletes through? Then on the other side, worry makes us feel bad presently and this gives us incentive to do things that diminish that worry. We tend to pay our bills given the present worry of what would otherwise happen.
As a parent I think I know what you wanted to say to that anesthesiologist. “Just as me smacking you in the face and giving you a drug to not remember getting smacked in the face by me wouldn’t right things, I will not assert that a drug which makes my child forget past pain, means that those pains were anything less than what they were”.
Interesting you bring it up, Loewenstein connected this sort of difference between the "experiencing self" and "deciding self" to this sort of decisions about undertaking difficult things like mountain-climbing. It's been a while since I read it, but I remember it being insightful: https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sds/docs/loewenstein/mountaineering.pdf
Thanks Tommy, that paper is quite relevant. Not only is it supportive of my general ideological stance, but it seems like it may have subliminally helped support your post here. I guess what’s interesting to me is that Loewenstein is hoping for behavior economists like himself to take their utility theory beyond just consumption, and even though economics is already founded upon that general utility maximization premise (which yes, may sometimes be difficult to measure). This premise is why I think economists have been able to developed a wide assortment of effective models. Conversely the more basic behavioral science of psychology has no such generally acknowledged foundation, and so to me its dearth of effective modeling seems appropriate. Could my above simple reduction that we’re all instantaneous pleasure seekers bonded with the past through memory, and the future through hope and worry, help the science of psychology harden up to develop models that are similarly effective? I suspect so.
Given the utility component of what we’re discussing I figured that I should check out your recent Bentham Bulldog podcast. (https://benthams.substack.com/p/an-inebriated-tommy-blanchard-and?r=2xwlat&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=audio-player)
Since Mathew considers consciousness irreconcilable with a causal world by means of mere epistemological dynamics such as “Mary’s room”, we might observe the assertion of one prominent (and faithful) medieval person. William of Occam asserted that faith cannot be reconciled with reason. This is to say that a metaphysical boundary exists between the two varieties of explanation. I agree! So I’m not a naturalist given mere empirical observations, but rather for convenience. Because science should otherwise be rendered obsolete, I choose potentially explorable reason over supernatural faith. Here there’s nothing left to argue about.
Regarding your final questions, another would be to ask something quite Canadian. It seems causally logical that Krista and Tatiana Hogan are the only two known humans able to partly share their subjective experience, and this is because of how they strangely also share a thalamus. Beyond such unusual shared brain function being associated with shared subjectivity, what would a dualist interpretation of their situation be?
Great article. Reminds me of a rule of screenwriting: the most important 10 minutes of a screenplay are the beginning: they'll determine whether the reader will keep reading or not. The most important 10 minutes of the resulting movie are the end: they'll determine whether the audience remembers it or not.
I think those kind of insights from writers/storytellers are what motivated the original studies!
Nice discussion here Tommy While many of us here on Substack (I include just about everything I have written in Risk & Progress in this category also) assume that humans act in rational ways. We don’t.
Human beings are highly irrational as the examples here demonstrate.
Very interesting article, and some great reflections! Though I don't think this sort of point poses much of a threat to a utilitarian judgement of life. After all, remembering an experience is just as much an experience as the experience itself, and so it seems like we should just judge the value accordingly: the value of the memory is in the value of having the memory. Likewise, the value of the experience is in the value of having the experience, regardless of how you remember it. In other words, an experience cannot be made retrospectively worse.
This of course doesn't mean that making good memories doesn't have value--having good memories is a good thing after all.
I think the same sort of thing can also be said for non-hedonic goods. For example, there might be non-hedonic value in having real relationships with real people, but the value of the relationship cannot be made greater or lesser by how you remember it, but there is still value in having good memories of a relationship.
Thanks!
To your comment: Sure. But I think there never being a time when you have access to the value of all of those moments makes it difficult to judge what is or was best.
Yes definitely!