Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Alongside the industrial and the digital revolutions, the modern era has witnessed a happiness revolution. The scientific study, laboratory refinement, and industrial production of happiness are all big business. If we count among its products the dopamine rush with which we are awarded for our small efforts online, the happiness industry is now the largest in the world. But just as mass-produced plastic items lack any lingering aura of the artisanship packed into the traditional crafts these items supplant, so too the isolated, distilled, and monetized product that has been studied and developed and sold back to us as happiness shows little continuity with traditional articulations of what happiness is. I should perhaps confess at this early moment that I am not, myself, happy. With the right dosage and combination of SSRIs and anxiolytics, and a whole battery of specialists to keep me propped up, I find I can get by in this world well enough for now, and am even able to come across to those who know me as a high-functioning go-getter and an all-around genial fellow. But the cost of this is enormous, and the resulting condition remains both artificial and tenuous — like a golf course in a desert. I bring up my own happiness deficit at the outset only because I hope it can help to reveal something almost paradoxical about the topic at hand. Ordinarily we imagine that not knowing something directly is a good reason not to write about it, especially in this age of “standpoint epistemology” and general disapproval of any effort to move out of one’s “lane.” You probably do not want to hear from me about what it is like to be a woman, or a victim of the historical legacy of settler colonialism (though if you do I’ll probably be willing incautiously to hold forth). And yet my own constitutional unhappiness seems to me no reason at all to decline to write about happiness. On the contrary, I suspect that someone who claims to be happy is the last person we would wish to hear about happiness from. Achieving the condition in question, or claiming to achieve it, appears ipso facto to be a mark of inexpertise. This may be in large part because those who claim to speak about happiness from direct experience often appear, especially to those of us who are constitutionally unhappy, to be lying. If they weren’t lying, we often think, but were simply living their happy lives, it is unlikely that the topic of happiness would interest them enough to set themselves up in the world as its experts and representatives. A truly happy person, we the unhappy suspect, would not be able to think of happiness as a commodity, with a price-tag and a limited supply. A truly happy person would emanate happiness somewhat in the way that the God of Neo-Platonism emanates being, as a natural magnanimous flow, so that anyone entering into that person’s presence would automatically come to have some share in it, at no cost, while the emanator would not thereby be deprived of any of his own supply. Whatever is being sold by the happiness experts, we imagine, cannot really be happiness, but can only bear a relationship to it even more distantly removed than the one a synthetic mass-produced blanket at Target has to an early American album quilt. Or the relationship here is perhaps like a nutritional supplement you might take that dubiously claims to encapsulate in a single small pill the numerous beneficial molecules known to constitute the principal dishes of a Mediterranean diet. It might be true that you can put garlic-like and fish-like compounds in a pill, but if you swallow it on top of an American diet otherwise based on corn syrup and refined flour, it is unlikely that you are going to enjoy the same health history as a nonagenarian Greek islander.   As the happiness industry, relying on cherry-picked scientific studies, has grown more effective at isolating marketable “happiness molecules” and synthesizing them for mass production, it has largely lost any historical memory of the long and difficult efforts that philosophers have made to determine, coherently, what happiness is. Significantly,