However good you predicted your life would be last year, you make a big update January 1 when you hear you won the lottery. Nothing good has happened yet: you don\u2019t have money and you\u2019re not buying fancy things. But your predictions about your future levels of those things shoot way up, which corresponds to happiness and excitement. In contrast, on February 1 you have $1 billion more than on January 31, but because you predicted it would happen, it\u2019s not that big a mood boost.
Of course, your conscious brain should be able to fully update on \u201CI will not see my spouse again\u201D the moment they die. This explanation assumes that the unconscious is slower to update. I accept this assumption. I\u2019ve never had a partner die, but I\u2019ve had some bad breakups. The next few months really are a series of \u201CIf only X were here\u2026\u201D and \u201CThis is so much worse without X\u201D. Then eventually I mostly update and stop thinking of X being around as a natural comparison. The depressing part of the breakup is over. I assume something like this happens with bereavement, which is usually considered to be especially bad for a few months to a few years.
Widowers Sky Update 1-CODEX
New relationship energy seems like a good match for bereavement. Both last a few months to a few years. Both seem to involve updating on your life taking a surprising turn. Until you\u2019ve fully updated, you feel unusually good/bad. After that\u2026
This sort of tracks with Part I and II. There seems to be an extra-sparkly type of happiness associated with new relationships (relationships you haven\u2019t adjusted to yet, that aren\u2019t baked into your predictions, that haven\u2019t already been hedonic-treadmilled away). This lasts a few months or years while you slowly update your predictions. Then hopefully you end up with a more stable type of happiness associated with good long-term relationships.
Suppose you reached the point where it sounded exactly like background noise. Your spouse could give you a dozen red roses and a sonnet about your many excellent qualities every day, and it wouldn\u2019t update you at all. At that point, you either need to have the mysterious \u201Ccompanionate love\u201D thing in place - something that isn\u2019t based on reward prediction error - or you are doomed to never feel another positive emotion from your relationship at all.
Another possibility is to say you can never predict away all reward - sort of like how even after your spouse has been dead for weeks, your brain still hasn\u2019t fully adjusted its \u201Cpredictions\u201D. This would also match an \u201Cactive inference\u201D theory of drives, where the body implements hunger by something like a non-update-able prediction that you\u2019re well-fed, and then lets you be unhappy about the \u201Cprediction error\u201D and work to fix it. Maybe some lingering happiness from things like good relationships come from an inability to update the last little bit of the \u201CI am not in a good relationship\u201D prediction, added specifically as a hack so that people in good relationships can still be happy. But I don\u2019t think this matches the neuroscientific evidence; you can just check the reward center for simple things (traditionally a monkey drinking juice) and find that it\u2019s fully adjusted away this prediction (even though the monkey presumably enjoys the juice just as much as we enjoy our predicted rewards like Ferraris.)
"My sister is a devotee of the conqueror gods Reman and Talos, not the love goddess Dibella. She is plotting with those men, not having orgies with them. I'd wager I've slept with more men than she has," laughed Antiochus, and then grew serious. "She's behind the delay of the council offering me the crown, I know it. Six weeks now. They say they need to update records and prepare for the coronation. I'm the Emperor! Crown me, and to Oblivion with the formalities!"
"All your men are dead," smiled Potema. "But there was no battle here. Merely quiet and efficient assassination. There will be battles ahead, against Modellus in the Dragontail Mountains and against the remnants of the Imperial Army in the City. I'll send you regular updates on the progress of the war." 2ff7e9595c
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