From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@ricochet.net)
Date: Fri Jun 01 2001 - 21:17:01 MDT
Mitch and I guess that in general food and sex don't
become boring, but Samantha and Adrian guess that they
do. I now guess that it should have been obvious all
along that it does get boring for some, but not for
others.
But the point I was making is this: observe that for
many people, and for many animals, these things do not
become boring. What is boredom anyway? Please recall
that boredom is merely one of natural selection's ways
of trying to increase the number of offspring you have.
Getting bored is a non-trivial cerebral transformation
that doubtlessly took many millions of years for nature
to perfect. And it is simply true that for some activities
in some organisms it simply gets turned off (or never
engaged) again in order that the organism produce the
maximal number of offspring. The logic is obvious; if
creatures do get bored with sex, they tend (under most
circumstances) to have fewer children. As an extreme
example, if an animal always found eating to be boring,
the animal might very well starve to death.
Progress will entail our control over boredom. There
are some activities that bore me right now, but that
once I get some control over my nervous system, I'll
find them fascinating. Some of those even now would
enhance my survival, but literally I am broken and
defective because I find those boring.
In the same way, if you are bored by sex, it means
that something probably went wrong in your phenotype
or genotype, in the (weak) sense that it is predisposing
you to have fewer offspring.
(Alas, I wish the following were needless to say on
an extropian list, but I must add that, following Dawkins,
of course we wish to rebel against many of our genes,
perhaps even those that inspire us to profligacy.)
Lee Corbin
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