From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Sat Jan 08 2000 - 17:34:44 MST
"Ross A. Finlayson" <raf@tiki-lounge.com> writes:
> If you've never felt pain you wouldn't know what pleasure is.
> Perhaps this is not quite so, ie, there is a difference between
> pleasure and ambiguity, but it is along the same lines as yin/yang,
> perhaps even Jungianism.
I disagree. Pain is very different from pleasure (one is IMHO a
somatosensory alerting system, the other a motivation regulation
system) and not comensurable even if they tend to inhibit each
other. People with no pain sensitivity are able to be happy. I wonder
if there are any people lacking *mental* distress? Probably even more
handicapping than lacking pain sensors, but I don't see any reason why
they would be unable to feel pleasure (hmm, let's see... a lesion to
the amygdala, perhaps some to the periaqueductal grey, definitely one
in the anterior cingulum... any takers? :-)
Am I getting too neuroscientifically narrowminded again? I have a flu,
so my stupidity-inhibiting subsystems are not performing as well as
they usually do. :-)
> Side note: political correctness is political correctness.
>
> I appear to have drifted, the subject of this e-mail is about
> memetics thus memes. Visually, the word "memes" looks like it could
> be pronounced "mee mees" when it is pronounced "meems." The mass
> media is its own meme.
I always think of the word as shouting "Me! Me!". They are small
self-referential critters, those memes.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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