Studies such as these demonstrate that once we have an experience, we cannot simply set it aside and see the world as we would have seen it had the experience never happened. To the judge’s dismay, the jury cannot disregard the prosecutor’s snide remarks. Our experiences instantly become part of the lens through which we view our entire past, present and future, and like any lens, they shape and distort what we see. This lens is not like a pair of spectacles that we can set on the nightstand when we find it convenient to do so but like a pair of contacts that are forever affixed to our eyeballs with superglue. Once we learn to read, we can never again see letters as mere inky squiggles. Once we learn about free jazz, we can never again hear Ornette Coleman’s saxophone as a source of noise. Once we learn that van Gogh was a mental patient, or that Ezra Pound was an anti-Semite, we can never again view their art in the same way. If Lori and Reba were separated for a few weeks, and if they told us that they were happier now than they used to be, they might be right. But they might not. They might just be telling us that the singletons they had become now viewed being conjoined with as much distress as those of us who have always been singletons do. Even if they could remember what they thought, said and did as conjoined twins, we would expect their more recent experience as singletons to colour their evaluation of the conjoined experience, leaving them unable to say with certainty how conjoined twins who had never been singletons actually feel. In a sense, the experience of separation would make them us, and thus they would be in the same difficult position that we are in when we try to imagine the experience of being conjoined. Becoming singletons would affect their views of the past in ways that they could not simply set aside. All of this means that when people have new experiences that lead them to claim that their language was squished–that they were not really happy even though they said so and thought so at the time–they can be mistaken. In other words, people can be wrong in the present when they say they were wrong in the past.
Stretching Experience
Lori and Reba have not done many of the things that for the rest of us give rise to feelings near the top of the happiness scale–cartwheels, scuba diving, name your poison–and surely this must make a difference. If impoverished experiential backgrounds don’t necessarily squish language, then what do they do instead? Let’s assume that Lori and Reba really do have an impoverished experiential background against which to evaluate something as simple as, say, the dutiful presentation of a chocolate cake on their birthday. One possibility is that their impoverished experiential background would squish their language. But another possibility is that their impoverished experiential background would not squish their language so much as it would stretch their experience–that is, when they say eight they mean exactly the same thing we mean when we say eight because when they receive a birthday cake they feel exactly the same way that the rest of us feel when we do underwater cartwheels along the Great Barrier Reef. Figure 7 illustrates the experience-stretching hypothesis.
Experience stretching is a bizarre phrase but not a bizarre idea. We often say of others who claim to be happy despite circumstances that we believe should preclude it that ‘they only think they’re happy because they don’t know what they’re missing’. Okay, sure, but that’s the point. Not knowing what we’re missing can mean that we are truly happy under circumstances that would not allow us to be happy once we have experienced the missing thing. It does not mean that those who don’t know what they’re missing are less happy than those who have it. Examples abound in my life and yours, so let’s talk about mine. I occasionally smoke a cigar because it makes me happy, and my wife occasionally fails to understand why I must have a cigar to be happy when she can apparently be just as happy without one (and even happier without me having one). But the experience-stretching hypothesis suggests that I too could have been happy without cigars if only I had not experienced their pharmacological mysteries in my wayward youth. But I did, and because I did I now know what I am missing when I don’t, hence that glorious moment during my spring holiday when I am reclining in a lawn chair on the golden sands of Kauai, sipping Talisker and watching the sun slip slowly into a taffeta sea, is just not quite perfect if I don’t also have something stinky and Cuban in my mouth. I could press both my luck and my marriage by advancing the language-squishing hypothesis, carefully explaining to my wife that because she has never experienced the pungent earthiness of a Montecristo no. 4, she has an impoverished experiential background and therefore does not know what happiness really is. I would lose, of course, because I always do, but in this case I would deserve it. Doesn’t it make better sense to say that by learning to enjoy cigars I changed my experiential background and inadvertently ruined all future experiences that do not include them? The Hawaiian sunset was an eight until the Hawaiian sunset a la stogie took its place and reduced the cigarless sunset to a mere seven.29
But we’ve talked enough about me and my holiday. Let’s talk about me and my guitar. I’ve played the guitar for years, and I get very little pleasure from executing an endless repetition of three-chord blues. But when I first learned to play as a teenager, I would sit upstairs in my bedroom happily strumming those three chords until my parents banged on the ceiling and invoked their rights under the Geneva Convention. I suppose we could try the language-squishing hypothesis here and say that my eyes have been opened by my improved musical abilities and that I now realize I was not really happy in those teenage days. But doesn’t it seem more reasonable to invoke the experience-stretching hypothesis and say that an experience that once brought me pleasure no longer does? A man who is given a drink of water after being lost in the Mojave Desert for a week may at that moment rate his happiness as eight. A year later, the same drink might induce him to feel no better than two. Are we to believe that he was wrong about how happy he was when he took that life-giving sip from a rusty canteen, or is it more reasonable to say that a sip of water can be a source of ecstasy or a source of moisture depending on one’s experiential background? If impoverished experiential backgrounds squish our language rather than stretch our experience, then children who say they are delighted by peanut butter and jelly are just plain wrong, and they will admit it later in life when they get their first bite of goose liver, at which time they will be right, until they get older and begin to get heartburn from fatty foods, at which time they will realize that they were wrong then too. Every day would be a repudiation of the day before, as we experienced greater and greater happiness and realized how thoroughly deluded we were until, conveniently enough, now.
So which hypothesis is correct? We can’t say. What we can say is that all claims of happiness are claims from someone’s point of view–from the perspective of a single human being whose unique collection of past experiences serves as a context, a lens, a background for her evaluation of her current experience. As much as the scientist might wish for it, there isn’t a view from nowhere. Once we have an experience, we are thereafter unable to see the world as we did before. Our innocence is lost and we cannot go home again. We may remember what we thought or said (though not necessarily), and we may remember what we did (though not necessarily that either), but the likelihood is depressingly slim that we can resurrect our experience and then evaluate it as we would have back then. In some ways, the cigar-smoking, guitar-playing, pate-eating people we become have no more authority to speak on behalf of the people we used to be than do outside observers. The separated twins may be able to tell us how they now feel about having been conjoined, but they cannot tell us how conjoined twins who have never experienced separation feel about it. No one knows if Reba’s and Lori’s eight feels like our eight, and that includes all the Rebas and Loris that will ever