But when I stay up till 4 in the morning (work at 8am sharp) for the third day straight playing online Carcassonne, knowing I'll feel like sh*t for a week

The devil's in the details, or in this case that innocent little apostrophe-el-el I've bolded above. Best course of action or not, what you have here is a classic example of Dynamic Inconsistency.

But you could well be right about depression. I'm glad to say you're quite correct in guessing that I've escaped it so far.

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Aye, I'm with you on that one, at least in my case.

The ability to stay up until silly o'clock of the morning has nothing to do with my depression. The time when it hits is when I can't get up at silly o'clock of the afternoon, because of something I don't want to process (and probably can't affect!). Instead, I should get up and do something, anything, more productive, just to fill in the time. Instead, I hide, and then feel like crap, not only for the original reason, but also because I've just decided to waste the day.

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I guess you could have me bang to rights there, given that it was only a few days ago I was saying, in another comments thread, that (having read too much Locke) I am not even sure that me and future-me can be rationally said to be the same person :D

I don't think it's a case though of me thinking "maybe I can get away with one more game, and I might not suffer *too* badly tomorrow". There's a definite thought process of "oh my God I should have been asleep two hours ago, it's 100% certain I will die tomorrow, and I'm not even enjoying this, the only smart move is to turn the computer off"... and then starting another game. And then another.

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Dynamic Inconsistency

This is a nice explanation of why a statement superficially similar to Socrates' statement might be true. But it's not what Socrates meant. He believed in an absolute, universal standard of "best", achievable through knowledge and reason. It was this which he asserts people would do, if they were aware of it.

There's a strong implication in his work that he believes that a solution to an approximate problem is an approximate solution to the problem, since he believes that is aware of "better" options than others, despite acknowledging that everyone is ignorant, himself less so than most.

But crucially, he didn't mean that if you stay in bed five minutes, that's because staying in bed was the best thing, for you, at the time, as a blind consequence of whatever neurological processes your brain uses to compare its desires for "bed" vs "breakfast". So even if that happens to be true, he's still wrong, we've just changed the meaning of "best" to suit.

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Oh. goodness.......
That's it, to an absolute t.

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Thanks for linking this in your journal!

Fucking hell yes I agree too. I'm doing it right now!

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Excellent, it felt like I might be onto something when I thought it, so I'm glad to see it's striking a chord.

I guess the popular (un)comprehension of depression is "so that means you're, like, miserable all the time, right?" Which clearly isn't right in my experience. It seems so neat and wonderful to be able to connect the dots to Socrates' famous asssertion, and guess that depression might be the inexplicable inability to act to one's one rational advantage. And sure, you might be quite sad on that basis, given that the likely result is you repeatedly screwing up your own life!

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Socrates was famously equanimous, wasn't he? I seem to remember some story about his fellow-soldiers hating him for always being so cheery on forced marches.

It seems to me, though, that he should have just left it at "it is impossible to know the better course of action". You don't have to be a wild-eyed philosophical outlier to suspect that making value judgements about potential future outcomes is far from guaranteed to give a reliable answer.

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He couldn't even die unsmugly: the whole weighing up the whole pros and cons of euthanasia versus exile in grim barbarian lands, and pronouncing himself to have made much the wisest decision, if only other people had the clarity of thought to see it. I imagine Dom will go out in a broadly similar way, in a century or so ;)

If Socrates had alleged that "it is impossible to know the better course of action" he'd have been out of his job as a sophist, and he might have had to do honest labour as a farmer or bureaucrat or something. He wasn't a fool you know!

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Having thought about it just a little longer I believes it's actually central to Socratic philosophy that you CAN know the better course of action, that the ideal philosophical operator (someone not that unlike Socrates himself) could just bang out perfect decision after perfect decision until the cows came home.

He was a pretty arrogant and elitist man really, wandering around telling everyone else they knew nothing and were chained to their subterranean seats counting flowers on the wall and playing solitaire till dawn with decks of 51. Everyone else is making a hash of everything, not because it's hard to get things right, but because they're stupid and far removed from the light of wisdom. A light which Socrates can, of course, introduce them to for a very reasonable subscription fee.

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my epiphany arrived

You mean you've found new livery for your scapegoat. Of course nothing makes a difference in the end; but if you're "lost in the labyrinth" it's because you'd rather subsist on the pride and pity of bewilderment than man up to the challenge of the quest.

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And would it be scapegoating if I were to say it, or any other who has thuswise had their lives left in scaffolded ruins?

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In the good old days of course they'd have drafted feckless young mooncalves the likes of me into the armed forces before you could say Jack Robinson. A spell on the front line would put some discipline into the lad!

But for sure, if it helps you sleep at night to imagine you haven't spent the last 15 years kicking away at the crutches of a sick man, then it would be churlish of me to take that away from you. Heh heh :)

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God what a stunningly beautiful post.

I have to say searching for the ball of string has that frayed nerved edge of ecstasy.

May I never find it.

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I should love to say something more profound than 'gosh what a well written post, how concisely and clearly you have presented a complex interaction of moods and action!' but I can't seem to think of much else. Although it has prompted some related thoughts...

Often the course of action one chooses/feels able to take whilst afflicted is inaction. From that point of view I concur whole-heartedly with your post. It's slightly problematic for me to consider there to be an aspect of choice with depression, certainly at times there can be, and the importance of resolve and willpower in overcoming or managing depression should not be dismissed, but at the pain in the chest/crippling anxiety/catatonic stage there are precious few good for me/bad for me choices to be made. Things become less about choice and more about necessity...So I'm not sure. Although everytime I try to expand my counter argument I find myself saying 'yes but...' and back and forth it goes...

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I don't know if it's as simple as that, but I think you may be on to something.

Says the person who is currently reading LiveJournal rather than doing any number of more important, necessary tasks.

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Wonderful thoughts on the topic. Thank you for posting them & sharing.

But spare a thought for those of us lost in the labyrinth, choosing paths at random, hearing the bellowing and sometimes even smelling the breath of the minotaur.

Or perhaps the happy man or woman simply cannot hear the minotaur coming lost as they are in the brightness of their own maze. Ignorance, I guess, can sometimes be bliss.

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Wow. I am impressed with hot you put this.

Also: I almost wish I had read this before writing the short story I wrote for class today, all about a Labyrinth with a lack of a Minotaur.

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impressed with hot you

Freudian typos FTW!

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I don't think Socrates' statement is a description of depression. I think it's a description of emotion in general. I'm taking a very broad definition of emotion, there by the way, what I really mean is all feeling-things as opposed to thinking-things.

Anyway, the whole sentence is far too imprecise. There are too many meanings of 'know' and 'better' for it to really say anything at all. I do believe we always make the best choices we can given what we know and how we think at any given point. Even when depressed. But that's really not the same thing as what Socrates said. These ancient philosophers are vastly overrated.

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Well, of course I disagree with you on that last sentence! Although Socrates might not pass muster as a philosopher by the most rigorous standards of two and a half millennia on, he was still a fascinating genius who changed the world.

The meaning of the quotation, as I take it, is that everyone would always perform the best action possible... if only they knew what it is. Vice is ignorance, evil is ignorance, everything wrong about the world all boils down to ignorance. If we can only educate people enough, we can create paradise on earth. I personally think that's a bold, brilliant manifesto - by a man who in the end proved willing to sacrifice his own life in the hope it would make people think.

And wasn't he right, in the end? Xenophobia, homophobia, racism and sexism, aren't all these things dying the more we shine the light of truth and knowledge and education into the dark ages? Aren't we tottering slowly towards a world finally free of ignorance and superstition and violence bred of fear? If so, Socrates will be chuckling in his grave right about now.

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"What about when you're in bed and you know you're going to be late for work and you keep hitting the snooze button?"

I am reminded most of Tyler Cowen's magnificent assertion that "all people are equally good at time management, but some people are more willing than others to admit that they are doing what they want to do, while others maintain the illusion they wish they were doing something else". You seem willing, nay eager, to maintain the view that you wish for outcomes other than those towards which you actually work. I encourage you to examine that view critically.

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As usual, Tyler Cowen puts it better than I ever could.

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All very well coming from someone who enjoys making money (specifically, because he's paid for doing something he enjoys). It allows him to assert that those who find it difficult to earn money are still "doing what they want", and hence are not in an essentially disadvantageous position compared to him. The first task of the libertarian is to establish their moral entitlement to eat all the pies.

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When I was depressed I think it was that the short-term goal (killing the pain--or sometimes just changing the type of pain--feeling something, anything, different) trumped any kind of long term planning. So I guess I'm with bateleur? But thankfully it has been a long while since I was in that headspace.

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