From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Aug 12 1999 - 08:30:30 MDT
"Ken Meyering" <ken@define.com> writes:
> Any idea of sexuality can be reprogrammed?
Currently, there doesn't seem to be any good ways of doing it (despite
religious conservative claims to the contrary; the consensus among
psychologists is that it doesn't really work). There are of course
both social/cognitive and biological aspects of sexual preference. I
guess we will unravel the neurobiology of sexuality within the next
decades, and maybe then we can start considering how it could really
be reprogrammed. My guess is that the reprogramming won't be as simple
as a pill (due to the complex interconnections and associations),
unless we are talking about the nanotech santa claus age where brains
are rewritten on a daily basis and the streets decked with diamond :-)
Most likely a real preference change therapy would involve both a bit
of neural rewiring (a guess would be changing the limbic nuclei and
which body-feature detectors they are linked to) and some cognitive
therapy to bootstrap the new preferences; however, given the placebo
effect I wouldn't be too surprised that just giving part of the
cognitive therapy would help people change.
I wonder about the neuroscience of aesthetics...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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