User:Dialed-in-life/sandbox

1. Historical development Earliest thinkers History of Philosophy History of Religion History of Science History of Psychology 2. Happiness vs Meaning of life 3. Happiness and Neoroscience, Biology 4. Happiness and Physics The frontiers of applicable research 5. Social Sciences 6. Scientific vs philosophical knowledge 7. Religion vs Philosophy 8. The Pursuit of Happiness Catalog of approaches Favorite approaches The importance of fitting the method to the person The essentials to anyone's happiness Happiness and performance / achievement / mastery over nature

The gap between philosophical and scientific understandings of happiness

History of concept of happiness The history of thinkers, or philosophers, and what they believed is less than crystal clear. Ideologies extend back to thousands of years B.C., but understanding what their ideas were, in the context of the time, based on limited archeology findings, is of course difficult.

According to Wikipedia's article on the The Philosophy of Happiness, ideas are recorded back to around 500 B.C.

Psychology dates back to 1830.

Modern Science, such as the Physics we know today, started with Isaac Newton, also in the early 1800s.

Since then, the different branches of science can be organized in Hard and Soft Science, "with physics, and chemistry typically being the hardest, biology in an intermediate position, and the social sciences being the softest". Psychology is a soft science.

Positive Psychology How they interplay The gold standard for knowledge Rules of logic Mathematics / relationships to logic Mathematical basis for science Quantification Application of conclusions

Meaning, well being, and happiness have been subjects of thought since the. Since the dawn of modern science, we have begun to approach a quantified understanding of happiness. [w:positive_psychology|Positive Psychology] is breakthrough thinking, bringing philosophy, soft sciences (see [w:humanistic_psychology[Humanistic Psychology]]), and [w:hard sciences[Hard_and_soft_science]] like [w:Neuroscience] together. The parallels between particle physics, and happiness are also compelling.

Hard science offers the greatest control. If it could explain happiness, we would achieve it just as surely as we touched down on the moon. What a worthy goal. But many doubt we will ever be able to achieve a fully quantifiable theory. In the meantime, we fall back on soft science and philosophy. The continued refinement of these disciplines support the overall quest.

In the Universal Law of Happiness, we will discuss hard science theories as much as possible, and fall back to less rigorous disciplines as necessary, to achieve the best possible understanding of how to systematically achieve happiness.

The simple system of a particle in a box behaves in the same way as the complex system of a person. The box is Higgs Field. The particle may never touch the boundary, or its energy will become zero. Nothing exists without energy, so the particle would cease to exist if it touched the boundary.

People have boundaries too. A certain balance is required for life. Too far in any direction results in death. The person ceases to exist. As a person approaches the boundary, they experience pain. if they are centered within the boundaries, they experience happiness.

More than one particle is required for existence, since you cannot claim existence without yourself knowing it exists. Each particle introduces constraints for other particles.

An individual is a complex system of particles. A person's genetics, health, and knowledge all introduce constraints that collectively for the box.

A society is similar. All the individuals create constraints on the others. These constraints also size the box for any particular person. Because the system of interactions is complex, the size of the box changes.

And so it is with the natural environment. Individuals in Hawaii also have a different set of constraints than those in Alaska.