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Dr. Smith has proposed a reasonable, if perhaps somewhat oversimplified, view of happiness. According to his theory, happiness might be described as a state of balance. And when humans or certain animals achieve that balance, they tend to remain in that condition in order to repeat the happy feeling.
To illustrate this, we may study the action of two magnets. When their positive and negative poles meet, they are comfortably joined, and they remain there. In other words, they have attained a balance or state of happiness. If on the other hand, one of the poles is reversed, and positive pole is pressed against positive pole, there is resistance, instability, imbalance or a state of unhappiness.
Animals with some degree of intelligence seem to find happiness in reinforcement. Once they have gained one or more of their goals such as food, and water, they learn to repeat the actions that led to satisfaction of those goals. This repetition or reinforcement produces a state of balance or sense of happiness.
According to this theory, only animals with a significant capacity to learn should be able to experience happiness. But in truth learning can take place through surprisingly simple short-term actions such as scratching an itch, followed by pleasure, followed by more scratching, and so on. Thus learning can occur with almost no conscious thought.
For human beings, blessed with the ability to reason, goals are not limited to the short-term satisfaction of basic needs. Indeed, there is a strong link between happiness and the fulfillment of long-term goals. Even if humans strive for goals that are more complex and longer-term than the animals' goals, once those goals are gained, happiness is reinforced.
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