romka

Thanks for posting. That's great food for thought.

The article makes an assumption that when you engage in a competitive activity with an objective measure of success the subjective level of satisfaction is fully defined by your standing on the virtual ladder. If you spend ten years of your life trying to climb the ladder and don't even get to the median, you "fail". You've chosen poorly.

In practice, your level of satisfaction, your happiness, is a more complex function. Whichever activity you engage in, you may get a certain amount of happiness or suffering simply from doing it: some people like playing guitar and doing muscle ups, others hate every second of it.... (read more)

Patrick Hayes did a similar thing for physics. Dennett calls it sophisticated naïve physics, a special case of axiomatic anthropology.

Patrick Hayes, the artificial intelligence researcher, once set out on a project to axiomatize the naïve (or folk) physics of liquids. The idea was to provide a robot with the propositions it would need to use as its core beliefs if it was going to interact with people (who rely on folk physics every day). It proved to be more challenging than he had anticipated, and he wrote an interesting paper about the project, "The Naïve Physics Manifesto" (Hayes, 1978). In the naïve physics of liquids, everything that strikes naïve folks as counterintuitive is, of course, ruled out: siphons are "impossible"