From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Jul 17 2002 - 05:26:03 MDT
On Wed, Jul 17, 2002 at 02:35:44AM -0700, Samantha Atkins wrote:
> Anders Sandberg wrote:
> >[ One of the best ways of causing a stir at a cocktail party today is
> >to declare oneself asexual - it causes much more interest and frission
> >than outing oneself as gay (old hat!). People immediately rush in to
> >defend sex. Very amusing, and extremely similar to what happens when
> >one declares oneself an immortalist. ]
>
> What? They rush in to defend death? Why do people rush to
> defend something from someone who is not interested in it or who
> is out to go beyond it? How is such a one a threat to them?
It probably deserves a far longer and more careful answer, but my
personal theory is that people spend a lot of mental effort to convince
themselves that that unpleasant and threatening thing they cannot avoid
in the future really is acceptable and probably a good thing. A bit like
the fox and the grapes, but in the reverse. Since death is so tightly
tied to one's self-concept (it deals with its dissolution!) the coping
strategy also becomes part of this self concept. So when somebody
challenges this, there is a huge amount of emotional investment involved
and also a threat to the self-concept.
The same thing is true for sex and love. One of the hotter flames on the
Swedish transhumanist list occured because I did not share the extremely
strong emphasis on love that another member held, and he hence
questioned my suitability to lead Aleph and my membership of the human
race in general :-) People do get emotional when they discover somebody
has an "alien" value system.
> It is true though that a lot of non-extropians see discussions
> about asexuality or apparently questioning the value of sex
> and/or romance as further "proof" we are a bunch of eggheads
> removed from life and intend on supplanting it with the fevered
> products of our own warped and over-developed brains. :-)
As Aldous Huxley said: "An intellectual is a person who's found one
thing that's more interesting than sex."
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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