From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Sat Jun 02 2001 - 01:21:53 MDT
Lee Corbin wrote:
>
> Mitch and I guess that in general food and sex don't
> become boring, but Samantha and Adrian guess that they
> do. I now guess that it should have been obvious all
> along that it does get boring for some, but not for
> others.
>
Having to eat and defecate and so on just to have enough bodily
energy to drag around this body and to even think is not my idea
of an unmitigated blessing, thank you very much.
Being programmed by biology to seek sex and reproduction even if
I have no interest in reproduction and being programmed to enjoy
this and that type of sexual encounter and physical content and
feel this and that type of associated emotional response and
bonding does not make this effect not boring, much less really
good. I would rather develop more choice in what my bondings
and sharings with other people are and are not and on what basis
than this programming generally allows. Simply running with the
programming gets very predictable, has extremely dangerous
potential and is ultimately meaningless after a while. <woody
allen quotes to one side>
> But the point I was making is this: observe that for
> many people, and for many animals, these things do not
> become boring. What is boredom anyway? Please recall
> that boredom is merely one of natural selection's ways
> of trying to increase the number of offspring you have.
>
I refuse to be utterly and only given by the accidents of
evolution for all time. I do not agree that boredom is only
about increasing the number of offspring I have regardless of
how this emotion might first have gotten into our general
makeup. This is pointless reductionist thinking that tends to
deny or limit our possibilities for going beyond such accidental
programming.
> Getting bored is a non-trivial cerebral transformation
> that doubtlessly took many millions of years for nature
> to perfect. And it is simply true that for some activities
> in some organisms it simply gets turned off (or never
> engaged) again in order that the organism produce the
> maximal number of offspring. The logic is obvious; if
> creatures do get bored with sex, they tend (under most
> circumstances) to have fewer children. As an extreme
> example, if an animal always found eating to be boring,
> the animal might very well starve to death.
>
Irrelevant. I am not other organisms. I already have two
children. The rests are far more likely to be "mind children".
I am intelligent enough to eat as I need to to survive. Not so
intelligent and in control of myself to not overeat or avoid
eating the wrong things.
> Progress will entail our control over boredom. There
> are some activities that bore me right now, but that
> once I get some control over my nervous system, I'll
> find them fascinating. Some of those even now would
> enhance my survival, but literally I am broken and
> defective because I find those boring.
>
> In the same way, if you are bored by sex, it means
> that something probably went wrong in your phenotype
> or genotype, in the (weak) sense that it is predisposing
> you to have fewer offspring.
>
Or you have simply outgrown fascination with this bit of
accidental programming. I realize this can be unimaginable to
those who have not yet felt it.
> (Alas, I wish the following were needless to say on
> an extropian list, but I must add that, following Dawkins,
> of course we wish to rebel against many of our genes,
> perhaps even those that inspire us to profligacy.)
Yay! So let us get on with the rebellion rather than speaking
as if we are given for all time by our biological beginnings.
- samantha
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