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From The Atlantic:
It is a good question, but I was a little surprised to see it as the title of a research paper in a medical journal: “How Happy Is Too Happy?”
Yet there it was in a publication from 2012. The article was grappling with the issue of how we should deal with the possibility of manipulating people’s moods and feelings of happiness through brain stimulation. If you have direct access to the reward system and can turn the feeling of euphoria up or down, who decides what the level should be? The doctors or the person whose brain is on the line?
The authors were asking this question because of a patient who wanted to decide the matter for himself: a 33-year-old German man who had been suffering for many years from severe OCD and generalized anxiety syndrome. A few years earlier, his doctors had implanted electrodes in a central part of his brain’s reward system—namely, the nucleus accumbens. Electrically stimulating the patient’s brain had worked rather well on his symptoms, but now it was time to change the stimulator battery.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Virindi on Saturday April 28 2018, @09:37AM (3 children)
Yeah...why is everyone not on heroin? The answer is that human culture is self-regulating to this kind of threat. People are able to see the long-term effect it has on others and make a rational choice not to use it. The same would apply to some kind of "happy button", assuming everyone didn't try it all at once and that people were actually given the choice whether to use it.
A good analogy would be attacking a colony of bacteria. Killing off a few at a time will be ineffective, but if you can hit them all in one blow you can be successful.
Luckily, enough of the population seems to view new "wonder" technology with skepticism that, as long as we maintain the nominal ability to choose what we use, we are probably safe as a population.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by The Vocal Minority on Saturday April 28 2018, @10:26AM (1 child)
I think the two of you have a drunk some War on (Some) Drugs Kool Aid at some point. I'm assume at some point in your life you have had opioid pain killers? Heroin is like that, just a little more so.
Oh, and with a lot more barf.
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Saturday April 28 2018, @11:54AM
How so? I said society as a WHOLE is self-regulating, not that it doesn't destroy individuals. Or that all individuals couldn't deal with it. I said nothing about individuals :)
I think some individuals are capable of self-control of this kind of thing and others are not. But that is unrelated to my previous point; I was merely assuming the worst case scenario and saying even in that case it would be okay.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Saturday April 28 2018, @10:56PM
No, the answer is that heroin doesn't just make you happy. It makes you unhealthy, prone to severe legal trouble, and broke — all of which tend to you make you very unhappy.
The reasons for all that are well worth discussing; some are primary effects - the direct result of the drug - and some are social - taking away the liberty to make choices for yourself for whatever justification might be fielded.