What do you know is good?

[Narz]

It's 2:30 am here and I am munching on corn chips while watching Star Trek: Voyager. For me it is not late, as I live by a different schedule.

I assume you're looking at this from a health angle. Just please remember that not everyone's "late at night" is actually when it's dark out.

Yeah, I try to not eat 3 hours before bed, I don't always succeed but I feel better when I do.

Actually meal timing has no effect on weight gain or loss. It's made up. Studies have debunked this time and time again. All that nonsense about don't skip breakfast, jump start your metabolism and don't eat late at night cus it slows your metabolism, is just that, nonsense. It's simply because people who eat breakfast tend to have better habits so it's a correlation, not a cause, and also people who eat late at night it's usually watching tv, mindlessly eating snacks, so again it's habits causing a correlation, not a cause.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/is-skipping-breakfast-bad
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/does-nutrient-timing-matter
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/eating-at-night

I'm more concerned with how my stomach feels in the morning when I eat late @ night. Breakfast is overrated, better to just start your day, grab a banana & have a solid lunch.

Sex. It's a biological need (to procreate). You don't actually need to procreate but you still should be fulfilling your biological side of it. Tons of studies show how it's healthy for you. I'm talking about the physical aspect, not just intimacy. It's important and gets neglected in many western societies probably cus our pilgrim puritan forefathers thought it's naughty and needs to be confined to the marriage bed. Just be responsible about it.

Sex is great but it's not worth staying in a bad relationship for. And then when you're not in a relationship you have to use godawful condoms. Plus people acclimate to their current partners to the point where even someone 2 or 3 points lower in looks suddenly becomes more attractive. If I were the Grand Deisgner I definitely would change many things about sex (I'm still pretty pleased with the current system overall).

Sleep. Most people do not get either enough or high enough quality. Sleep is essential for your body to regulate hormones which affect all sorts of other things to do with your health.

Sleep is so important. Probably more important than diet for one's mental health.

"Good" is not an absolute property unto itself so this is really difficult beyond just stating preferences/opinion.

1. Laughing w one's friends (for just the right amount of time) --> what is the "right" amount of time? If this gets to be a moving goalpost it's pretty convenient!

I've had friendships where we're just screwing around joking n stuff all the time & that gets old.

1. Not eating late @ night --> definitely wise if you mean "near bedtime" and have reflux issues.
   
2. Mindful exercise --> as in exercising while avoiding injury?

Ya, alot of people hate exercise cuz they get injured or they push themselves too hard or do stuff they hate. Hence the mindful. For me exercise is somewhat pleasurable although also painful but after it's pretty much all positive. But when you get injured it's all negative.

1. Meaningful work --> How does one decide/assign meaning?

It all comes down to one's utility function(s) really.

Yeah you answered it.

I'm asking for ultimate good but ultimately it's a silly question, what I'm really asking is "what's good 99% of the time in 99% of situations".

I'm incapable of knowing what is good.

Who says?

 

[Narz]

There are many viruses and some parasites that can hijack human circadian rhythms to their advantage. What you believe is a beneficial amount of sleep, or what you think is the best time of day or night to sleep and rise, may actually be of more benefit to hostile organisms that reduce your overall health and lifespan.

Whoa really? Post something about that for me to read.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

There are many viruses and some parasites that can hijack human circadian rhythms to their advantage. What you believe is a beneficial amount of sleep, or what you think is the best time of day or night to sleep and rise, may actually be of more benefit to hostile organisms that reduce your overall health and lifespan.

Or maybe some of us are just night owls. I come by it honestly, as my dad was also a night owl. I did try to change my sleep schedule to start my day at 6 am (one summer between high school years I decided to spend some time each day learning stuff so I'd get up at 6 am to watch University of the Air - recorded lectures from Carleton University). I'd also watch morning news and educational programming, and developed the habit of reading the paper daily. This was when I was 15.

It wasn't until I started writing that I realized that I get some of my more interesting ideas happening later in the day and at night. The July session of Camp NaNoWriMo starts in just over a week, and that means yet another month of me doing most of my writing between 10 pm and midnight. After that time there won't be any phone calls, no more nurses will be visiting, no deliveries unless I happen to order pizza, and my TV shows are over by 10.

The only hostile organisms that tend to interfere with this are telemarketers and scammers.

 

[Ferocitus]

Whoa really? Post something about that for me to read.

I'm away from home for another week so I don't have the exact refs.
Search for:
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2017 (for discoveries concerning circadian rhythms)..
Malaria and glucose requirements during trophozoite/schizont (red cell stages).
Efficacy of some vaccines depend on the time of day that they are administered.

If you really want scary scenarios look up how viruses can break down into separate multiple components, each of which then invade completely different types of cells to reproduce, and then, via chemical signalling systems, re-unite back into the original viral structure.
The separate components (rather than just the complete virus) can also hijack circadian and metabolic systems before re-uniting back into the complete virus.
Viruses have the advantage over us because they (probably!) don't have beliefs and they don't follow the tosh spouted by influencers.

 

[Hrothbern]

4. Self-acceptance (while also not putting up w/ bullfeathers from yourself)

Self-acceptance is good in peace time.
If circumstances are bad or unreasonable, don't forget to take care of your self-respect, your self-dignity...
and give room, take care of that, for your primary group, your team around you.

 

[Truthy]

Are most posters in this thread claiming eudaimonia or "the good life" are fundamentally useless concepts? Are there really no claims we can make about human flourishing that aren't augmented with a bunch of context-dependent qualifiers?

 

[Narz]

Are most posters in this thread claiming eudaimonia or "the good life" are fundamentally useless concepts? Are there really no claims we can make about human flourishing that aren't augmented with a bunch of context-dependent qualifiers?

It's the internet, people can argue with everything.

Poster A : "Meditation is good"
Poster B : "You're sit & mediate while your baby is on fire?! You monster!!"

 

[Chukchi Husky]

Who says?

Everyone.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Everyone.

Not me.

 

[Peuri]

Sex is great but it's not worth staying in a bad relationship for. And then when you're not in a relationship you have to use godawful condoms. Plus people acclimate to their current partners to the point where even someone 2 or 3 points lower in looks suddenly becomes more attractive. If I were the Grand Deisgner I definitely would change many things about sex (I'm still pretty pleased with the current system overall).

Well, the Grand Designer wasn't trying to create happy people with fulfilling long lasting relationships. Seeing other people more attractive than your spouse at times makes perfect sense in evolutionary terms. Cheating around possibly increases the genetic variance your offspring has, as opposed to having offspring with just one member of the opposite sex, thus increasing the possibility of your genes surviving in the long run. That's why we have those kinds of feelings, unfortunately. Even famously monogamous species, like swans, cheat on occasion.

 

[Hygro]

What you believe is a beneficial amount of sleep, or what you think is the best time of day or night to sleep and rise, may actually be of more benefit to hostile organisms

What are you serious? I must know more

 

[Moff Jerjerrod]

"What do you know is good?"

Let me deviate from the general direction this thread is taking. I'm going to be a bit selfish when I state what I know is good so please forgive me.

1. Looking out the window on a rainy cloudy day and watching the cars go by and rain hitting the ground. Very therapeutic (for me anyway)
2. Same as 1 except substitute snow for rain.
3. Cold sunny days with temperature between 20 degrees F [-6C] and 30 degrees F [-1C]. (I can push my body exercise harder in the cold than in the heat)

I have many more but these will do for now.

 

[Ferocitus]

What are you serious? I must know more

I'm away from home for another week, so I don't have the papers and refs with me.
However, you can find a good start with the recent publications of Dr. Rachel Edgar at Imperial College London.
http://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/rachel.edgar/publications.html
Hope that link works - I'm on a rented laptop from a hotel with no mouse.
http://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/rachel.edgar
Edit: Or maybe that one. (Sorry, I'm a fumblefingers with a pad w/o a rodent.)

 

[yung.carl.jung]

1. Laughing w one's friends (for just the right amount of time)
2. Not eating late @ night
3. Mindful exercise
4. Self-acceptance (while also not putting up w/ bullfeathers from yourself)
5. Meaningful work
6. Cats & dogs (from an environmental standpoint ok, they're bad but from a human emotional standpoint they're good)
7. Designating time to spend in nature

heavy disagree on number 2 my man

 

[yung.carl.jung]

Actually meal timing has no effect on weight gain or loss.

was about to make a big post about this, thanks for saving me the time. I, too, searched the scientific literature and there seems to be a consensus that eating at night does nothing w/r/t weight gain

however it can still impart the quality of your sleep of course, because of metabolism and blood sugar and everything.

Are most posters in this thread claiming eudaimonia or "the good life" are fundamentally useless concepts? Are there really no claims we can make about human flourishing that aren't augmented with a bunch of context-dependent qualifiers?

I think right now this thread is more about hedone than eudaimonia, just look at all the ice cream discussion

 

[Narz]

heavy disagree on number 2 my man

It's good but not good for me.

 

[emzie]

Kindness isn't always good, but it's never wrong.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

Kindness isn't always good, but it's never wrong.

I'm unsure. kindness is good, just like tolerance is. but when you're faced with intolerance, your own tolerance should stop, as should your kindness. kindness should not be extended to those that try to abolish it, I feel. many people lauded Gandhi for his way of peaceful revolution. I personally think the Indians should have gone with a violent revolution. Brits had it coming for hundreds of years.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I have no idea what it means to be an "absolute property unto itself". Can you give an example of something that is that kind of property and explain what makes it "absolute unto itself"?

Good doesn't have anything to do with one's utility functions. You can have whatever stupid utility functions you want, it would still be good to help those less fortunate than yourself. If you have a utility function that suggests otherwise, your utility function is bad and you should get a new one that doesn't suck. Utilitarians SMH.

You can define it w/o using other things for context.

If I tell you I'm holding a rock, you and most people listening in can constrain anticipation of what is in my hand pretty accurately.

If I tell you I'm going to vote for good things, you'll get a complete cluster...luck of things people anticipate me doing at the polls, including outright disagreement about what my voting will be.

Or put another way, you can show me a rock or a car, but you can't show me "good" absent context.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

this is the divide I also mentioned in the babies thread. "absolute property unto itself" is a weird way of saying it, but it comes close Kants definition of "thing in itself". the Kantian divide between phenomena and noumena, or if you want to bastardize it the physical world and the world of ideas. a phenomenon is something we can locate in the real world and assess with our sensory apparatus, while noumena are ideas, motivations, norms and so forth.

Phenomena are the appearances, which constitute our experience; noumena are the (presumed) things themselves, which constitute reality

So you have a car in your garage, but no one can imagine that car. But tell someone "imagine a car" and everyone has an idea of what a car is. The "idea" of the car is the thing in itself.

What you're seeing in the real world is never a rock, a car, but rather you see exclusively appearances, to be precise what you're seeing is light being reflected off of objects put together into a coherent picture by your brain and so forth. The rock as a thing in itself belongs to the world of ideas, similiar to how Plato defined them: We instinctively know a chair from a table, but we can hardly find a perfect definition that encompasses all tables but not any chairs. We already have a preconceived notion of what constitutes a chair which then makes us recognize the sensory input as a chair.