On Sun, Aug 19, 2001 at 01:17:14PM +1000, Miriam English wrote:
>
> I am aware of the danger that depression in particular can pose, and may
> want to modify my slight tendency to that frame of mind. I very rarely get
> depressed. Unlike most people that I know, I'm optimistic almost all the
> time, but I do have rare fits of quite deep depression. It follows that if
> I live for hundreds, thousands, millions of years, if I don't have the
> depression thing patched then sooner or later I will experience a deep
> enough depression to cause me to break the slender thread which is my life.
> Ok, so fix that... end of problem. But one thing about that bothers me.
> Some of my best drawings have been done whilst in the grip of despair. It
> induces a strangely detached mind-set. If I eliminate that emotion then I
> eliminate its artistic benefits.
But isn't the artistic benefits due to the detachedmind-set rather than
the depression? So it would be a good idea to try to find ways of
recreating the mindset without the depression, or perhaps have a
"controlled depression" that one deliberately indulges in.
(In a similar manner, but less dramatic, I get better at set theory when
I have a cold, for some odd reason. :-)
> How do we minimise the dangers, but allow for the benefits to be explored?
I think that we need a deeper understanding of the mind in order to
truly reap the benefits of immortality. Being able to fix depression is
just a first order thing; we also want second order adjustments so that
the amount of emotions, creativity and unbalanced states become optimal
for human flourishing. I think that is a very complex problem, with many
individual solutions. Most likely there isn't any general solution, but
everybody has to design their own palette of mental states - it is
integral to the automorphing process we are performing as transhumans.
> The madness loop is harder to define, let alone solve. It is hard to see
> how circular memes could be solved for, but emotional frames of mind that
> are brought about by certain mixes of hormones could be. I can imagine a
> guardian angel program watching hormonal levels (the hormones would be
> simulated of course) and rebalancing them forcibly if they got stuck in a
> dangerous loop that lasted too long.
In one of my roleplaying settings had a world where mental states could
be redefined fairly easily. Hence addictions and loops were a common
danger. The local society solved it by having "The Psych Police", a
force of psychodesigners that regulary audition citizens, temporarily
putting them into a series of standardized rational mindsets so that
they can judge if they want to continue their lives as they did before
or switch to some more suitable mindset.
http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/Game/BigIdeas/dionysos.html
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