Buddhism is a hedonic philosophy.1 Siddhartha was an empiricist set on understanding the human condition. He had a singular objective: to reduce suffering. While Buddhism has ethical values, they exist to serve the hedonic goal. Morality simply happens to converge with happiness. We are limited to selfishness, but we can expand what we consider to be our self.2 The following is Siddhartha’s Syllogism:3
- People are valence-maximizers4
- Valence is a function of attention
- Attention is trainable
- Therefore, attention is worth training
People fundamentally optimize for positive valence. Nearly all behavior can be reduced to maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. From this axis, we derive our, more respectable, second-order values, such as family, kindness, and justice. Even sacrifice, or delaying gratification, is still optimizing for the present, reducing our immediate anxiety. We can only ever optimize for the current moment.
The classical experiment that challenges whether people are really hedonic is the “experience machine”. Would people be willing to plug themselves into a machine capable of producing any experience? While most say they wouldn’t, stated preferences differ from actual behavior. Looking at society today, most people are already wired to proto-Nozickian machines.
Our emotions are a function of attention. If we sustain attention on a negative experience, such as anxiety, we spiral into a panic attack. Inversely, if we fix our attention on a positive emotion, such as a childhood memory, we can spiral into blissful states which exceed the realm of ordinary experience.5
The positive loop requires stable attention. Yet, our constant exposure to hyperstimuli, such as television and music, tips our stimulation baseline beyond our evolutionary circuitry. Most of modern existence, therefore, is a form of eternal withdrawal, where simply sitting still is agonizing. Meditation recalibrates our baseline, so that color returns to ordinary experiences.
Lowering our baseline also implicitly restructures our values. Ordinary life can be considered a local maximum, and to reach higher maxima, one must typically first descend. Often, some catalyzing event, such as an illness, forces one to reevaluate their value system (e.g. one begins to weigh the present more than a future, leading to a career change). This unstable period of value restructuring is known in traditions as the Dark Night of the Soul. With meditation, these insights often arrive discretely, so the path to enlightenment, instead of being continuous, is a step function. The core insights in Buddhism are dissatisfaction, impermanence, and non-self.
If attention is worth training, when does the marginal value of training attention drop below that of other hedonic pursuits (e.g. television)? This can only be answered experientially, but for most people, the diminishing returns are likely distant. It also depends on risk-tolerance, as meditation can lower one’s baseline short-term.
Near the peaks, when attention is sustained inwards for long periods, reality begins to warp. Similar to how classical physics collapses subatomically, so does normal self-phenomenology when our attention becomes pointed.6 The sense of time dissolves, leaving only the present. In this atemporal space, the experiencer disappears, leaving only its Leibnizian derivative, experience. Contentment cannot exist, only joy. Neither suffering, only pain. The dimensions of time and space collapse into a single point.7
Buddhism, while often compared to Stoicism, is actually closer to Epicureanism. Both Greek philosophies share the concept of ataraxia, or equanimity: choosing reasonable desires over unstable ones such as status, fame, or wealth8. The difference is that for Stoics, the highest good is virtue (e.g. justice), while for Epicureans, like Buddhism, the highest good is hedonic. ↩︎
Not only do hedonism and ethics not conflict, but they converge. Throughout human history, what we consider “self” has expanded: oneself, family, tribes, nations, races, and now animals. We are limited to selfishness, but we can expand what we consider ourselves. ↩︎
I call this philosophy Attentionism. The Buddha valued empirical experience above all, and the essence of his teachings remains even if you strip away the metaphysics, such as karma and rebirth (which were absorbed from Hinduism). ↩︎
Valence refers to quality of experience. Positive valence states include joy, pleasure, and beauty, and negative include sadness, pain, and anxiety. Many neurochemical combinations (e.g. dopamine, oxytocin) can result in positive states. Some philosophers distinguish between higher and lower pleasures (e.g. opera vs. television), but here no moral distinction is made. ↩︎
These states are known as Jhanas. For a practical guide, see Right Concentration (Brasington). ↩︎
In most of Western thought, the “Experiential Threshold” was never crossed. Descartes said “I think, therefore I am”. Nisargadatta simply says “I am”. For Sartre, existence precedes essence, but for Hindus, underneath our identities is an eternal self. Psychotherapy aims to correct cognitive biases, while Buddhism challenges thinking altogether. ↩︎
Book recommendations: practical, The Mind Illuminated (Yates); philosophical, I Am That (Nisargadatta); narrative, Siddartha (Hesse). ↩︎
The Possession Paradox: when we don’t have something, we strive to get it. When we have it, we fear losing it. A double bind of desire and anxiety around possession. ↩︎