No, that was something different: the Total Perspective Vortex was a machine that would show you exactly how important you were in the grand scheme of the universe. Such hard knowledge of one’s own insignificance would usually drive people insane. IIRC, Zaphod survives because he’s actually in a VR universe created specifically for him - making him the most important thing in the virtual universe.
The universe is finite? WTF does that mean/imply?
The universe is infinite? Argggghhhh
Time has a begining and or an end? Arggghhh
Time is infinite? Argggggghhhh
I’ve pretty much decided if I become an old coot in a nursing home these concepts will drive me batty towards the end if I start to get obsessed with them. That and fracking black holes.
Found it! All hail the Great Wikipedia!
Asimov’s Breeds There a Man…?. linky
Huh, I just posted about this story in another thread, now I get to bring it up again. From the Harlan Ellison short story “Grail”: the appearance of your one true love. Not her name, not where she lives, not even whether she is alive or yet unborn. The certain knowledge that you have a perfect love, that you are worthy of it, and that you will never attain it.
The “Church” of Scientology claims that learning the content of their OT III coursewithout proper preparation will drive one insane.
Note: This is the piece of really mediocre SF featured in the "Trapped in the Closet"episode of South Park.
I’ve no idea how to Google quickly and accurately enough, but there’s a quote somewhere attributed (I think) to Henry Kissinger on how being given clearance to view the most secret information can be a maddening thing.
First you feel great knowing all manner of things you didn’t before. Then you feel frustrated at not having know them and so made decisions before that you certainly wouldn’t now. Then you have to speak to people with lesser clearance and you have to take pains not to give away what you know.
Not exactly a single thing that would drive you mad, but a frustrating way in which to think.
-Somewhere in the next twenty to thirty years.
-It will probably involve chocolate.
Was Cassandra mad, before the Greeks came?
For RL, I can imagine that being a scientist who knows that the Dinosaur Killer is coming, or that the Pinwheel Star decided to go off, would eat at a person. Inconstant Moon is a favorite of mine for a fictional example of that kind of knowledge, and what it does to people.
Thank’ee! Just downloaded it and will read it. (These may be the last sane words I write…)
Four for Heinlein. Toss in “All You Zombies,” which is pretty crazy-making, and the son-of-a-gun gets five! Damn effective writer, he was!
The absolute knowledge of when and how others would die can be quite depressing.
Back in college, I was in a room full of ethicist-type philosophy majors working on their senior theses; one guy tossed out a Schopenhauerian claim: folks motivated by the pursuit of happiness are powered by sheer damn irrationality, since honestly reviewing one’s experiences would show the bad has far outweighed the good. Run the hedonic calculus on your own life, he argued, and see whether, amidst failure and frustration, we unhappily struggle for fleeting moments of joy – incentivized solely to the extent that we can keep ourselves from noticing the “fleeting” part.
They all considered it. By a show of hands, he wasn’t wrong.
Except insofar as pursuing happiness as an end is not the same thing as experiencing happiness. Telling someone that they must make an effort to be happy is like telling them they absolutely must not think of a purple polar bear at that moment.
I’m just gonna… Draw the drapes and take a nap…
I’m with you, but the reasoning was more like this: imagine a guy who flatly tells you his goal in life is to maximize personal happiness while minimizing personal unhappiness: striving to at least break even, and at best make it as lopsided as possible.
Imagine, too, that year after year he experiences vastly more unhappiness than happiness.
And so, at the start of a new year, he acts as if he’s in store for more happiness than unhappiness; he anticipates it, he expects it, he works for brief moments of satisfaction by joylessly making all sorts of means-to-an-end efforts – and, by the end of that year, nope, the unhappiness again outweighs the happiness.
If he’s irrational, he can start yet another year that way: never realizing that he invariably fails to break even, and never drawing the obvious conclusion.
This may be a bit of a tangent, but it seems to me that certain scientific advances and world events in the mid- to late 1800s caused a lot pf psychological problems for people in Western society who went through that period as adults. Basically it was a loss of innocence… prior to that time, there were widely accepted answers to the problem of how to deal with the fact that life sucks. (Examples: “God intended this life to be a trial” or “OK, it sucks now, but we are progressing towards Utopia”.) But scientific advances, and events such as the Civil War and Crimean War (better technology just means we get to kill ourselves in larger droves), seemed to provide increasing evidence against both of those comforting explanations. This caused great psychological upheaval in certain individuals who had grown up accepting the old views. Melville and Twain strike me as two examples of people who may have been profoundly affected in this way.
Interesting point there.
But it’s still entirely rational! Which of the two scenarios is preferable: forty years with eight minutes of happiness, or forty years with one minute of happiness?
Sure, in both cases, the overall rate of return sucks, but it is still rational to seek to improve that rate!
Grin! I like purple polar bears! (I have a checker-board-pattern penguin by my desk-side!)
Also, to many of us, pursuing happiness is happiness. Baking a pie is a lot of fun, damn near as much fun as eating it. Shopping is nearly as much fun as consuming. Putting in the hard work in advance of a fun event – say, a birthday party – is even sometimes more fun than the party itself.
Heaven favors people who like their jobs: they get paid for it twice!
Out of sheer irrationality, I’ll take 48 years with 1 minute happiness, please.
Or rather, would you choose 48 years with 8 mins, or 72 years with 8 mins?
In all seriousness, as much as I think misery overweighs joy, those are negative pits and positive bumps in an otherwise smooth, flat plane or slope of a certain degree of satisfied.
Misery and Happiness are fleeting low and high points. Being satisfied or content is the usual baseline (barring out any life-circumstance(s) that might make your life abysmal).
Now you KNOW why the “Necronomicon” (Abdul Al-Hazred) is kept nder lock and key, at Miskatonic University!
Not necessarily irrational… Depends on the relative weight, or value, or utility, you assign to happiness and to simply being alive.
It isn’t irrational for me to say, “I prefer chocolate to vanilla.” It might, however, be irrational if I buy vanilla anyway!
btw, love your login name. For a season, I worked repairing Hewlett Packard photographic printers, the washing-machine-sized ones that Wal-Mart uses to print pictures from digital cameras. I had a LOT of exposure to cmyk!
(One day, I couldn’t figure out where the hell all the magenta ink was coming from. Turned out, I’d cut my finger, and it wasn’t magenta ink at all; it was my own blood!)