From: Osher Doctorow (osher@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Wed Jul 17 2002 - 12:42:22 MDT
From: Osher Doctorow osher@ix.netcom.com, Wed. July 17, 2002 11:27AM
I agree with Anders on the present email and with Aldous Huxley also in the
present email, but I would go much further. Nobody is challenging the
function of sex in procreation, not even I. But this is hardly the function
of sex in materialistic societies of either the West or the East (former
USSR, etc.). It is an adjunct and in fact one of the most important
aspects of materialism as opposed to knowledge-orientation. The fact is
that to become a Creative Genius, one has to be eventually obsessed with
knowledge. I've met quite a few people obsessed with sex in my 63 years,
and they were neither mentally nor physically capable of spending much time
being obsessed with knowledge.
The whole subject of *pleasure* is in my opinion one of the key signs that
one is dealing with an ultra-materialist when the latter advocates it. In
my younger days, I spent years arguing with a communist sympathizer woman
who was obsessed with the *pleasure* of sex and viewed communism as
establishing total achievement of pleasures and elimination of *artificial
capitalist inhibitions*. The argument is almost identical when it is
advocated by the *other side*, the hedonist capitalists.
We have to be very cautious about what we interpret by the meaning of the
word *pleasure*. We are born rather stupid, preferring not to study, not
to learn, not to discipline ourselves to do practically anything including
walk. If we could keep a notebook in infancy and childhood, we would
probably be utterly convinced that doing those lazy things is utterly
*pleasurable*. How intuitively clear that seems! Incidentally, it is
also *pleasurable* for infants and children to defecate, and some adults
retain this belief! Now, in sex, when the action is over, one is
physically exhausted and men generally go to sleep. Is this a sign of
*extreme pleasure,* or of the *elimination of tension*? Well, let's think
about knowledge. The more you get into an interesting book about science
or even science fiction, the more interesting it usually get. You are
unlikely to go to sleep after the interesting parts - in fact, the
interesting parts keep up their interest and even increase it. Teachers
and professors keep up their interest in knowledge day and night typically,
working on problems for days in many cases if not weeks and years with brief
rest.
There are also several *confounding variables* involved. One is the
function of an email forum to foster romance or sex and direct or indirect
*advertisements* of romance or sex and availability, which is quite common
in forums up to a certain level of scientific or philosophical knowledge.
A second is the conviction of many people in their most procreative years
that what they think they feel is somehow the most valued and desirable
thing in the world. I know a man who has never changed this view, and is a
*womanizer* of the most bizarre type in his old age, but whose mental
abilities roughly stopped parallel to his womanizing. Fortunately,
Civilization keeps believing in moral and ethical standards (well, outside
certain ethnic groups anyway), which means that for many people when you
have done it long enough and often enough, sex changes its priority and
increasingly falls further and further behind knowledge and reason.
The Alcaida and their Moslem Fundamentalist sympathizers are among the most
sexually obsessed people on earth, men using women and regarding them as
below cattle. Violence and sex and materialism are in my view all part of
a materialistic complex. One would have to know history and pschology and
social sciences and have good reasoning from logic and philosophy to see
that, and quantitative knowledge couldn't hurt.
Osher Doctorow
----- Original Message -----
From: "Anders Sandberg" <asa@nada.kth.se>
To: <extropians@extropy.org>
Sent: Wednesday, July 17, 2002 4:26 AM
Subject: Re: less sex, more brains!
> 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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