From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Thu Mar 30 2000 - 19:43:30 MST
Anders Sandberg wrote:
> "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com> writes:
>
> > See, now that's just what I mean! There isn't any of this great,
> > dramatic indecision and hesitation. The correct choice is usually an
> > order of magnitude better than any alternative, and obviously so; I can
> > recall only one or two major decisions in my life when this was not the
> > case, and neither of them were transhumanism-related. (And hey, if you
> > make the wrong decision, you make the wrong decision. Obsessing over it
> > won't help.) I read _Great Mambo Chicken_ when I was eleven, and I did
> > not "decide" that my life would be about ultratechnology; I simply knew
> > that it would be.
> >
> > There was never a point, in all my life, where I could have plausibly
> > refused the quest.
>
> You too? I think the same holds true for me - I have as far as I can
> remember (plus some supporting evidence from my parents from earlier
> periods) been aimed at space, ultratech and going beyond the
> human. Beside some theme music I have never noticed anything like the
> call to adventure, I guess either we are both suffering from poor
> scriptwriting, have a modernist script not using the monomyth
> structure, or our lives so far have only been the beginning of the
> story and the call to adventure is in our future.
Actually, from Neo's perspective, it was much the same thing. Any
"ordinary" person might have had a decision to make, but given Neo's
biases and attitudes - and especially given as he had spent so much time
and effort trying to find Morpheus and discover just what was going on -
there really wasn't any choice as to what pill he could take.
The call to adventure is constant. It sounds every time we hear a new
idea with promise to dramatically improve your world, where the
alternative is not bothering with it. Many would dismiss these dreams
as pure fantasy and/or too risky - but given who we are, we have no
choice but to explore.
> Of course, we still don't know if the genre we are living in is
> science fiction, thriller or socialist realism... :-)
Nonfiction. People don't bother making up stories exactly like it
'cause it's just what people experience day to day anyway - and who
wants to hear *that*? ^_-
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