From: GBurch1@aol.com
Date: Sun Jul 04 1999 - 08:27:36 MDT
In a message dated 99-07-02 22:29:38 EDT, lubkin@unreasonable.com (David
Lubkin) wrote:
> While I am largely enthusiastic about our shared visions of the future,
I'm
> uncertain about
> the prospects for love and friendship.
[snip]
> As a science fiction writer (among my other hats), I have often thought
> about this, but
> cannot conjure up a future that I think is plausible that does not
> jeopardize both love and
> friendship as I know them. To me this seems an inevitable danger that
> scares me as
> much as nanowarfare or deliberate grey goo.
Far from seeing the pleasures and benefits of love and friendship as being
threatened by the kinds of technological transformation to which we look
forward, I see the prospect of enhancement of these feelings and
relationships. Love and friendship grow out of shared values, goals and life
experiences. I don't see that basic truth changing, although the ways that
these relationships are formed and the feelings are expressed will.
Consider the life of a pre-modern human. For most of human history and
prehistory, an individual's circle of social interaction was restricted to
the small handful of people in one's extended family or tribe. Every
individual with whom a person came into contact had essentially the same life
experience and prospects, within a fairly narrow range of diversity dictated
by simple sexual and narrow cultural bounds. With the development of writing
and transportation technologies like the domestication of the horse, a few
privileged individuals were able to expand their social sphere to include
distant people with more diverse life experiences. In the last two hundred
years the proportion of people able to enjoy that diversity, and the range of
the available diversity for social interaction, has broadened dramatically.
Transhuman technologies promise an acceleration of this broadening of social
horizons, but the fundamental values upon which love and friendship are based
won't change, in my opinion. Just as today I am able to form friendships
with people who are distant in space and life experience through the use of
jet aircraft, telephones and the internet, with the new technologies to which
we look forward, we will continue to expand the range of entities with whom
we can form bonds of shared values and life experiences. Imagine how much
deeper and richer friendships with distant comrades will be with mature
virtual reality. Imagine how enriched friendships will be when much higher
bandwidth communication will be possible. And the prospect of friendships
that extend in time vastly beyond the mere eight decades to which natural
humans are condemned to live is truly wonderful!
I recently watched Ken Burns' wonderful documentary about Thomas Jefferson.
He did a fantastic job of depicting the tender reconciliation between
Jefferson and Adams in the correspondence of their last twenty years.
Imagine if that renewed friendship had not been cut off by their deaths! The
shared life experience of the two men formed a basis for a deep and fruitful
friendship in a context that the younger men -- who had for a time become
political "enemies" -- could not imagine.
In his fiction Greg Egan has explored how love and friendship might persist
through even the longest and most transformed lives. In "Permutation City" I
recall how the main characters maintained a core of emotional connection
across the fantastic automorphism of two uploaded humans. And in "Diaspora"
he explores how entities from vastly different beginnings and with completely
different goals and basic cognitive forms reach across such gulfs to form
friendships and find love. I highly recommend those books for a view of how
the fundamental values of love and friendship will persist in a radically
post-human world.
> A related question: what are the evolutionary advantages to love and
> friendship?
> What non-human species do you think have these experiences?
I think it's clear that animals co-evolved these emotional responses in
connection with the selective advantage of social life. I have certainly
seen what appears to be only a slightly more primitive version of our own
feelings of love and friendship among the non-human primates I've observed
closely.
Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
Attorney ::: Vice President, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide
http://users.aol.com/gburch1 -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
"Civilization is protest against nature;
progress requires us to take control of evolution."
-- Thomas Huxley
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