From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Apr 22 1999 - 11:47:44 MDT
"Eric Ruud" <ejruud@ucdavis.edu> writes:
> It seems to me that after a certain amount of time, sexual pleasure will be
> obsolete, due to greater advances in neural science. Not only is it not
> productive ( wow... what an incredible unintentional pun) in our current
> society, it can and will be superceded by greater methods of pleasure. Even
> today, for a lot of heroin users sex pales in comparison to the purely
> chemical high. Who knows what's coming next?
So why settle for one kind of pleasure? Why not all of them,
skillfully composing them to symphonies of hedonism?
I'm reminded of the Aristoi in Williams' book, who could do things
like parallel real/VR sex combined with poetic and musical
appreciation.
> I'm reminded of the role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade (I noticed
> some roll-playing buffs on this list) where the immortal (see a parallel,
> anyone?) vampires have replaced the lust for sex with the far more powerful
> lust for human blood, which is the sustenance of the species.
>
> Might we be doing ourselves a favor to somehow link physical pleasure with
> that by which will sustain ourselves in the future?
As somebody once suggested in the remote past, maybe we should link
our stock portfolios to the pleasure centres? Or we academics our
bibliographies?
("Yes! Yes! The reviewers have accepted my paper! AAAAAAAAAHHHH!"
Hmm, doesn't seem to different from today :-)
(BTW, the vampires of the game show an important point: in a society
with immortals, you better make sure resources are not limited or it
will become very nasty. If there was an infinite frontier the Neonates
could always move away from the Elders.)
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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