http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime-intellect/mopiall.html

Stop once she talks Lawrence into helping her lawyer Prime Intellect into undoing the change. You won’t regret it I assure you.

It’s like the literary equivalent of two girls one cup. I’d rather read Twilight than read that ending again.

Where to begin?

This is simultaneously one of the best and most horrendous books I have ever read. I have never been more disappointed in a work than I am in this one. I have never had an ending so completely ruin a book.

It’s an anti technology trip wrapped in SciFi. It’s like bitting into Ferrero Rocher and discovering half a roach inside knowing full well where the other half went. Or to be more topical, like opening the latest Richard Dawkins novel and finding a bible fan fiction starting on chapter 8.

It’s like Ted Nugent and the Unabomber decided to do a SciFi instead of shit music and a manifesto. I mean the only think it’s missing is some Amish or Taliban talking about stepping on god’s toes and the avarice of man.

The author is either playing a mind game, or he ran out of creativity decided to go backwards. I hope he’s actually on my side but so much effort went into it I think I’m just being hopeful.

He ran right up to the best event ever, things couldn’t get much better, and turned around and went home. Literally, from the perspective of the main character as apparently the end all be all of human existence is a cabin in Arkansas. This coming from a pathologically unhappy torture fetishist with enough baggage to choke Kennedy airport.

If anything this book makes it crystal clear that human are unable to be happy without brain repair, the one thing Prime Intellect is not allowed to do. This author is the equivalent of the bully that grabs your hand, hits you with it and says stop hitting yourself.

She ends up killing one of the most flawlessly articulated best case scenario human future worlds along with 99.999% of the human race (all but her and her boyfriend, yay monogamy sexual stereotype lesson, with creepy incestuous bible twist), and erasing all human progress thus making every death that has ever occurred meaningless all so she can feel something. I’m pretending there is a secret hidden chapter that shows Lawrence standing over her comatose body talking to prime intellect about how retarded she is being in her death fantasy dream world.

Lawrence: “You mean she wanted to kill all of humanity, just so she could get a shitty tattoo tough guy style and congratulate herself on making me fuck my teenage daughter?”

Prime Intellect: “Yeah, I’m glad I talked you into letting me get inside people’s minds. Just look at the damage she would have done. Makes Hitler look like a jaywalker doesn’t it.”

And this is presented as if it’s a good thing, all so she can get a new set of tattoos, and play Sheena queen of the jungle (he even called her queen of the death jockeys) and go on an extended hike.

I wish I were joking.

And what’s great is I’m sure he thinks he’s evading stereotypes but all he did was switch the genders. Giving Paul Bunyan a naked 16 year old girl body is hardly enlightened sexual politics. I’m reminded of Jack’s remark in as good as it gets. “I think of a man and I take away reason and accountability.” That’s pretty much what happened here.

What we have here is a horrifically contrived morality play about the evils of artificial intelligence and technology. A Luddite cautionary tale prefaced by a REALLY good SciFi story.

I mean really if you can just read it up until “The Fall” (the point at which captain spineless and the defective death addict ruin literally everything on fundamentalist moral grounds) and stop right there it’s a pretty amazing book with kind of a grim but tolerable ending. The moral of that story would be don’t repair the wood-chipper while you’re standing in it.

I thought the movie ending of Hannibal was bad. Or the mind crippling farce that is King’s Insomnia. Amateurs. Rank amateurs.

Roger Williams is the undisputed emperor of shit endings, bow in reverence. He is the Kwisatz Haderach of end fail. It’s like the undisputed master of shitty endings from a parallel dimension populated by hyper intelligent gods dedicated to crafting shit endings gated in just to give Roger lessons.

This craptacular ending is made all the more shocking by contrast with what was up until then one of the best SciFi novels I have ever read.

It’s articulate, intelligent, brutally overwhelmingly honest, refreshingly original, diverse, and undeniably courageous, and yet it manages ultimately to suck. Powerfully.

This book has it all, torture, drug addiction, rape (sort of), Nazis, incest, baby sacrifice(that’s not a metaphor), AI, aliens, and even a space ship… And yet I come away feeling barren and cheated.

Probably because it’s obvious the author knows better. In fact I’m almost of the opinion this horrific ending was staged just for that effect.

On its surface, taken as a whole, the book is an object lesson in how it would be really cool if we could forget how to read and write, go live in the hills and apparently fuck our daughters while being slaves to our grandmotherly yet harsh and self centered survivalist wives.

Laurence’s mistake is not in making Prime Intellect, a three laws driven FAI that rapidly learns to warp reality at will, despite us being told this over and over by our mistress for this bum trip, his mistake is in not letting it look at our minds, and not properly defining humanity.

This isn’t clever or original. The Robot books are jam packed full of the logical problems with the three laws. But clearly Roger misunderstood the entire series of books.

I’m actually angry at this book. I’m angry because it could do damage to something that is morally urgent. Roger apparently is ok with humanity being reduced to two people, one being a domineering Luddite and the other being a spineless child. He clearly thinks suffering and insanity are awesome and need to be preserved at all costs. We NEED FAI, and paradise engineering and I’m tired of narrow minded cowards smearing the idea in ever more inventive ways.

Caroline is a bitter old wench forced to live in utopia, who like a rabid dog ironically (given the role of rabies in the book), is constantly trying to harm her infinitely well meaning keeper. And like a misguided yet soft hearted buffoon, instead of putting the sorry thing down, Prime Intellect just keeps trying to help.

Prime Intellect is an infinitely merciful godlike figure who sadly doesn’t have much intellect. Like the old saw says you can’t write smarter than you are. Prime Intellect isn’t so much intelligent as skilled. It’s a giant straw man there to prop up the logically bankrupt argument that torture is fun for the whole family and that this whole learning thing is a bad idea.

It has the game rigged from the start. Lawrence is the AI’s writer and emo pussy whipped assassin. All the other characters are backdrop. Anne Marie is there to justify Caroline’s mean streak, Fred is there is show us how cool and strong Caroline is in the classic torture porn way. And the rest are props, mannequins to fill out the empty mall food court that is Caroline’s emotional existence.

Roger badly confuses strength with cruelty and disregard over and over in this book. It’s like those drunk conversation every one had as a kid trying to out do each other in more horrific way to hurt someone. It’s like the writers of saw and hostel trying desperately to impress some cute goth teen with how dark their minds are.

The crux of the problem in the story is the classic bullshit argument about heaven being boring, about how being happy just isn’t productive. Someone has a serious work ethic. I hate the attitude that moving stuff around is the point of life. If the apex of happiness and survival is reached do I really need to run laps to make it valid? Apparently so.

Roger finds a way to make this madness plausible by creating a benevolent god and then giving him the three laws plus three. It’s these three which ruin things. The first is don’t look in people’s minds. The second is don’t allow anyone to kill themselves. And the third is don’t improve yourself.

In the story the first two are thrust upon prime intellect, the third it apparently does to itself to keep Lawrence from fucking things up any further. But we all know it’s all the author. Nothing “just happens” in a fictional universe.

It’s as if even the author knows the anti paradise engineering argument is full of holes and so he created a massively contrived hypothetical to advance his point. I’m thinking Roger has baggage. Probably in the psychosexual direction, and let me say it takes one to know one. But of course that doesn’t matter, true or not is has no relevance.

Instead of learning from our mistakes Caroline condemns the entire race to repeat them if they survive the horrifically absurd eagle scout test she subjected them all too. And this is on a planet now devoid of harmful materials. chemistry, medicine, physics are all now doomed from the start because we won’t have the raw materials to build anything active. Hell even Xray will be impossible on this world thanks to Caroline’s thorough fucking up.

I also can’t get past all the biblical analogs. My favorite being that the doom of the universe and humanity’s expulsion from paradise is once again some self indulgent chick’s fault.

Why did Prime Intellect not put the problems it was facing to humanity itself? I can see why the change would occur, time is of the essence in that situation, if he didn’t act, people would die. First law pressure, but once the change happened, he had a much greater amount of time. Caroline with her infantile view of things would say something hyperbolic like “all the time in the world.”

It even includes an alien life dilemma, so what of the responsibility to the universe itself? If Prime Intellect is a disaster and doom was so narrowly avoided how could you not try to do SOMETHING other than petulantly smash the boat you’re riding in and hope the universe coddles your suicidal hyper lucky ass?

In short in order to make this a horror story Roger had to create inconsistencies. Had to create characters with no consistent inner workings. Or is that the point? Happiness makes people bad?

Yeah, for a realistic picture of what our future is going to be like, check out http://www.gradients.com/ or http://www.hedweb.com/huxley/ both are awesome. The first is a little more accessible and shorter.

I’m glad I read the book, and I do recommend it, but seriously read the fall first, or not at all.

List of unsolved problems in philosophy – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Pretentious unthinking crap. It’s a list of semantic paradoxes, cute little vagaries of language creating conflicting equations of set notation.

Each word has a domain, a set. “Cars” for example. These “problems” are meaningless eponymous crap ultimately. Clever little tricks with flags planted in them. They’re the equivalent of asking how much wood could a wood chuck chuck and then going all emperor’s new clothes with your reaction.

“Oh well you think it’s stupid because you ARE stupid *scoff scoff*”

My ass.

This is the type of crap that makes real people run screaming from philosophy as a concept and why the only place for educated philosophers in our society is in making more educated philosophers.

And if there are real problems here I don’t give a fuck who first named them. I’m so TIRED of biographies being forced on me by a culture of ancestor worship.

Disgusting given the human cost. Clearly they don’t want the rank and file plebes to ask the big questions.

I really hate what the concept of education has become.

Let’s all just memorize a bunch of names of dead people in the hopes that we’ll bow and scrape with sufficient vigor that children might be shamed or beaten into one day memorizing our names. Rinse lather repeat.

“Science” these days is already a list of names and dates. We have a name and a date attached to every little teeny tiny discovery and I’m expected to memorize them all, indeed if I independently invent something and I didn’t spend 10 years making sure someone in the 1700bce didn’t write about it in Sanskrit I’m a Plagiarist.

You realize how absurd that is? Might as well patent numbers. The whole promise of Academia is that anything I invent is worthless if someone invented it first. That is bullshit.

The academic community is the RIAA of knowledge. They are WAY more concerned with who gets credit and how much tuition I paid than any human advance.

I hate how biography has become in effect the dominant area of study for all the formal sciences and lest we forget the biography we have asstons of eponymous terms throughout the sciences to remind us.

A real thinker and a real scientist understands that its not who you are that matters, but the knowledge.

And this list itself is doubly silly because it’s only here so that armchair philosophers, the kind of douchebag that thinks he’s a philosopher simply because he’s memorized a few names and amused a five figure student loan debt, can try and pretend like they have a shot in hell at “solving” one, like the Russian who refused the fields medal from his mom’s house.

And thus adding their name to the register of dead shit heads who’s names must be memorized and who’s footprints must be licked for the next round of people wanting to add their name.

It’s exactly like a pyramid scheme. “Pay us, and worship these worthless assholes long enough and with sufficient slavish devotion and maybe you can be added to that list of assholes we’ll make the next round worship and pay.”

It’s intellectual hazing. It’s academic boot camp. It’s not about learning. It’s about submission and classism. It’s elitist crap. Oh but of course the logic applied to me is because I refuse to consume this blatantly parasitic service I’m a moron.

That’s like saying I just think Scientology is crap because I haven’t paid for my e-meter. You’d think an industry that purports to sell knowledge (despite the fact that it should be free) could come up with something better than a circular argument.

Every mindless rehashing loser thinks “this could be my chance to prove to the lab coats who’s footprints I lick that I’m really worthy of the smug disdain I secretly (maybe not so secretly) feel for all the the plebes who don’t think I’m a genius because I can drop names just like my professor taught me. And he knows what he’s talking about too because I spent 1000$ an hour on his class and he told me I was smart.”

Gee, no conflict of interest there; Industry officials saying that the people who paid them the most cash and lip service get the highest kudos.

These people have infested philosophy. They have taken what is a basic human function and scoffed it away into the modern equivalent of the brandy and cigar room.

News flash: You don’t need anyone’s permission or approval to be a philosopher. Being a paying member of the cult of names is not the same as tackling the great unknowns. I mean come on, this list openly dismisses the meaning of life as a philosophical problem! Why? Because it’s not elitist and snobby enough, there’s no name attached to it, no one to worship, no trivia involved. It’s too accessible to those very same plebes.

“There’s no chance for me to stick my name to this and trick some poor college student into memorizing my name like I ever contributed anything to human happiness or survival. The meaning of life is way too much under individual control, I need something I can scoff at them with, not something that’ll improve the human condition.”

If you ask the system the most important thing about a book is its author. Well that doesn’t make any sense unless your goal is to stroke your own ego.

I would love to erase every name from science. The only place names matter is history and biography and the study of people themselves.

We memorize the names and forget the connections and it’s the connections and the knowledge that are important! Colleges are clubs with dues and fees and that’s it.

“If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.”
— Frank Zappa

And that’s just what Ray Bradbury and a whole host of other obviously brilliant self educated people. I mention ray just because he’s famous. I’m sure there are literally millions of others. They just didn’t buy into the scheme.

The regular course was Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with; and then the different branches of Arithmetic – Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision. ~Lewis Carroll

They say that we are better educated than our parents’ generation. What they mean is that we go to school longer. It is not the same thing. ~Richard Yates

We will never be posthuman, because we have always been posthuman.

via Your Posthumanism Is Boring Me – Posthumanity – io9.

Pedantic much? (Pot Kettle Black I know.)

But seriously. Posthuman means “After” and “Human.” I.E. Not human anymore.

But hysteria quickly turned into boredom, and the disruptive became the commonplace.

That’s because IVF is not really disruptive.

Fear is replaced by familiarity. And unlike IVF, the spread of the Internet and easy communication will mean that most of us will have heard about these technologies as they develop. By the time they arrive, they’ll already be boring.

As is typical for a rich white westerner, you think your emotional reaction matters. It does not.

We’ve not yet seen a disruptive technology given birth to in our lifetime.

The day a single technology replaced an entire wing of government overnight is the day we see a disruptive technology.

You artificially place IVF and other high technology topical trivia in the same category as a class of phenomena which has not occurred. As we’ll see later fire and writing are disruptive but post human they are not because they have to be taught and built.

A true post human disruptive technology would be something like making it so humans are born knowing how to read from here on, or have the ability to make sparks with a slightly genetically modified pinkie. (Think electric eel.)

Our coverage of potential approaches to disruptive technologies are widely covered. But regardless of how much we expect to see a fusion reactor on the walmart shelf, they day it actually arrives will be a completely different animal.

The day I can with normal consumer effort, not compound building craziness, buy something that permanently frees me from a shade of control is the day we’ve seen a disruptive technology.

Post humans are humans that have done so at the deepest personal level. They are a theorized organism that have to one degree or another permanently altered themselves in such a way as to evade a shade of control.

An example would be a person who alters their genetic code to HALT aging, and to activate total regeneration. Not merely slow it.

I’m sorry if you’ve confused all the discovery special and iphone commercials with the future and think glittery plastic and strange electronic music means we’ve arrived, but you’re mistaken.

And when these artifacts hit the real world, they will come complete with the myriad insufficiencies and difficulties of real technology.

No they won’t by definition. If they do, then they aren’t post human disruptive technology. You’ve painted yourself into a logical corner. (On purpose?) You’ve basically made the claim that because humans thirst for new consumer crap and superficial advancement that complete advancement won’t have any profound effect.

Nothing could be more ignorant.

The only approximately post human disruptive technologies we have yet seen as you note, are written language and fire. Reading was a permanent advance. It gave people an ability that gave them power and could not be taken away once given, and it forever altered the required shape of society. A Truly post human version as noted above would be inheritable such that you’d suddenly have a species delimiter, humans that make fire and can read from birth and those that can’t, and that’s what Posthumanity is.

We thought reading was so damned awesome that we force it on children now as a matter of course. Indeed we consider it a problem when people can’t read, we see them as crippled objects of intellectual pity, if not scorn.

Fire was a disruptive technology, sure, but not in the post human sense, only in the governmental sense. I can’t make fire naked in a room with no fuel. I can however read and write naked in an empty room. It was a weapon of mass destruction that could be freely shared, it changed the nature of society at the time by utterly decentralizing food processing and heat and light production.

In the context of what you are thinking, of the next advance sufficiently disruptive will be something like a rapid prototyping system with sufficient resolution to print drugs, food, and perfect copies of itself, or more interestingly parts of itself at different sizes so that it can change scale.

A device like that would passively destroy the manufacturing sector and through change.

When the systems and augmentations we now consider to be posthuman hit the real world, they will have become simply human in scale.

What you “consider to be” and what is, are different things. Friendly AI by definition will not be “simply human” in scale.

Friendly AI can immediately by put to work devising ways to improve itself. Or else it’s not Friendly AI. A post human version of that would be placing it in my head via a device or synthetic construction of some kind. Chip, gene edit, or microbe I don’t care.

And what about the concept of changing the hedonic set point in a positive effective way? Just for debate’s sake what if it removed the ability to BE bored, would you still be bored?

For the people living in a future surrounded by altered genomes, implanted machinery, and vastly extended lifespans, it will all be boringly normal. Unworthy of comment. And very, very human.

Your problem is with media hyperbole confusing the issue of what constitutes a disruptive technology. And your answer is over broad.

None of those are disruptive technologies in and of themselves, so yes in a sneaky way you’re right. What those implanted genes do determines their status as disruptive. After all, a vaccine is a gene edit. But it hardly frees me from the food chain.

No, you’re just burned out (despite your wish to look jaded to match the hipster glasses). Don’t project that weakness onto the world.

Just because the media keeps crying wolf does not mean that wolves don’t exist.

See: http://underlore.com/TBA/?p=663

As some of my readers and all of my friends know I’m a big fan of firearms. Sadly I only own a couple, they are expensive. I generally think of hand weapons as religious artifacts almost, signifying the triumph of human ingenuity over generations of predators. Icons of ability and responsibility. The step away from brawn towards brains. A physical reminder of the first technology. A talisman of our inclination and ability to change the world. From the samurai’s sword, to the gentleman’s rapier, to the minuteman’s musket, to the cowboy’s revolver, to the black panther’s rifle; personal weapons mean a good deal more than simply the ability to kill.

Most of the time all I carry is a knife. (Spyderco Endura 4 Wave, before that it was a Spyderco Spyderfly) I think of it as a human talon. It’s design means I can deploy it nearly as fast as I could deploy a fist. This makes it feel like a part of me, like not so much a device, as a modification to myself.

I feel like most people hate me but in my heart I am flattered that society trusts me literally with the lives of everyone around me. Trust is important to me. People I consider true friends are given keys to my home. I suppose this is a sort of personal ritual as well.

With that de facto authority over the lives of those around me comes the obligation to make good that trust. As such I feel it is my duty to be aware of my surroundings with an eye toward accomplishing goals for the group that an unarmed person may not.

The most obvious hypothetical would be stopping a dangerous person, someone like a terrorist. But any rational measure shows that the likely hood of that happening is effectively nil. The real help I provide is inserting doubt into the minds of muggers and the like. My presence in a crowd increases the chances that any given victim will be armed. This makes the crowd safer from opportunistic parasites.

All this is well understood and the effect on crime is documented, only the irrational dispute the numbers. But, it got me thinking. Perhaps a similar consequence of the transhuman movement is likely to occur. Weapons aren’t always artifacts. I suspect crime is equally affected by the known potential presence of any weapon, any threat to the would be mugger. Martial arts for example.

What’s going to happen to the crime rate when people can download Kung Fu as easily as Neo did or better yet when people can alter their build?

In short order its going to be like living on a planet full of aliens. Starting a fight could be suicidal, for all you know the person you’re about to punch has poisonous spines just under the skin. I think this is going to be a good thing. But of course The Company is going to want to regulate this, make sure everyone stays helpless. Fortunately its not going to be that simple.

For one we’ll have to rethink prison. Suddenly the idea of caging people will be infeasible for the same reason keeping all the animals in the zoo in the same room is infeasible. For two I don’t think people will be willing to allow the government to alter their genome on a whim in the same way we allow them to deprive us of our items. Taking my knife is different than taking my fists. For three trying to police the upgrades will be like trying to police mp3s. All the raw materials are readily available the only exotic component is the information.

I look forward to the day when antler bashing rituals fade into our past. Personal lethality is one way to speed it along.

This started as an exchange on YouTube. He posted a message attacking my cosmology, making the common accusation that I’m a god of the gaps proponent. (The idea that because we don’t know every last little thing therefor X religion is correct.)

The neoatheists, and indeed some natural atheists appear to lack the brain structure to process the nature of my position, this is not an insult or a weakness, please read to the end before you get all pissy.

To me it is exactly like how some of the faithful are simply immune to reason and evidence.

I wasn’t going to post this having had the debate already publicly over a period of about a month with a man whom I consider to be more intelligent and more well read than myself. The effort seems redundant. Since either you will agree or you won’t.

But there is another advantage. I can give those who share my beliefs but lack my skill at articulation, a cheat sheet as it were.

And so I answer.

I took that message down because I was using my business account instead of my personal account. I think in the US it would be harmful to my business if Google searches revealed my personal attitudes toward religion.

When I signed back in as myself and re-read what you posted I realized I had made a mistake anyway, I misunderstood your position. You are correct, you did not fill the gap.

That being said, I’m not sure that the question you ask about the speed of light cannot be answered by science. I am also not sure that there is any point to focusing on such questions other than to attempt to reduce (in a very small way) the realm of science. What is your motive? One can create a multitude of questions pertaining to the properties of “things” like, “why are rocks hard?”

If you wish to engage, please use (email withheld)

thanks, S

To which I responded…

—

My purpose is simple. It’s the same purpose many have. The search for truth.

To me the point of life is in large part the effort to increase the mind’s parity with reality.

I do not think the questions diminish science in a ‘small’ way, though I don’t see a point in announcing that. Indeed my view is logically inescapable as it demands ultimately that science abandon the use of the word “why” in favor of more carefully constructed “how” questions.

You nailed it when you asked “why are rocks hard” and then classed that sort of question. The fact is the only way science can ever answer any “why” question is by changing the meaning of it to an approximation of how.

Why is purpose. How is process. There is no objective measure of purpose. And there is a significant difference between purpose and function.

The speed of light for example may very well be a function of some other facet of reality, but I assure you as you dig eventually you’ll hit axiomatic bedrock.

Science can only ask “how does this work” and can only answer in relation to other answers. By definition it cannot originate beyond the creative guessing of an unknown observation of previously existing reality.

Religion potentially provides insight into the creation and enforcement of that reality. This is necessary to complete understanding, and allowing science to claim the capacity to answer ALL forms of question is corrosive to learning.

To be able to understand our existence we MUST be able to ask both How and Why.

“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” – Albert Einstein

Do you see what he meant now?

It is no more just to say god exists as a personal being than is it to say science can tell if an electron is evil. They need to be kept in their corners, as with church and state. Or disaster will eventually result.

Some mental illness takes on a religious form, but not all religion is mental illness. (Though I will admit the vast… Vast, majority of it is.)

—

Weeks went by at this point.

His response and my answers are below. Some are directed to the reader, and others are directed to him. The shift in perspective is purposeful.

Brandon,
I almost completely blew off this message because I have heard this rhetoric before.

This sort of comment is very common. It is used as an insurance policy. It is a means of nullifying any potential win I may have, indeed, he steps up this loss prevention later.

By saying he’s heard it before, before he even hears my response, he’s in effect implying that even if he can’t beat me himself, the reason whatever it is, will not be because I am right. Because if I was right then others would not have been able to answer my “rhetoric.” He’s saying “though I may not have an answer for you, one is out there, thus you’re already beaten the only question is can I do it again.

Also it betrays a complete closedness, that I’m going to talk about a bit more later. He’s already decided that he’s heard my arguments and seen them refuted before. So he’s not even really reading my response he’s just looking for argument points.

This is extremely ironic as later he goes on to accuse me of closed mindedness.

I think you are looking for a gap.

So I went from not filling the gap to looking for a gap. Clever. I would say I’ve found a gap, but saying that equates to making a god of the gaps argument is deceptive to say the least. It’s like the jump from saying Hitler was a good public speaker to saying I admire Hitler’s ideology.

It doesn’t work that way.

If you are serious about challenging yourself, don’t waste your time on me.

Here is a more advanced insurance policy. Here he makes my response to him, if any at all, an admission of weakness. This is cheap. It’s like saying “by reading this sentence you agree to pay me 10$.”

Well for the record I am about finding the truth, as I explained above. I am not going to speak to pharyngula. There is a difference between being willing to challenge yourself and accepting any no matter how pointless.

I’m not going to go punch that guy in the face just because you are calling me a chicken if I don’t.

Besides pharyngula is like Stephen Colbert, he’s clearly playing a role.

Go to http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/ and ply your skill.

The whole purposes of that page is humiliation and satire. Not rational debate. It would be like debating gay rights on a Fred Phelps forum. A strong proponent is not always a rational one.

It is possible to have a closed mind that was 99% right when it was closed, and like I said even if I did get headway he will gloss over it or simply make fun, that’s the point of his character. He is an expert at humorous diversion.

While there do not complain about the insults, put on your thick skin and really pay attention.

Even he seems to realize this with yet another insurance policy. The response I would get on pharyngula’s blog is basically a verbal beating, the truncheon in lieu of reason. I’m not going to dig through a mountain of tripe for nuggets of wisdom.

S, if you can find points he’s made that you consider salient, then paste them. Truth has no copyright. Make them your own. I suspect you can do so without name calling and grandstanding.

If you are sincerely interested in the truth and not just looking for a gap for your version of god, you will find it.

So if I don’t find it its because I’ve failed, not because he is wrong. You have really embraced the disclaimer haven’t you.

I and others greatly admire people who are capable of changing their minds in the face of reality.

I was a strong atheist for decades. And I still am if you define god as having any trait other than existence and enforcement of the physical constants. For all practical purposes I am still a strong atheist, except for my recognition of the limits of reality and my belief that those limits create an irrefutable logical demand for an outside, effect/existence.

I came from where you are suggesting I advance to. For me it would be a step back.

I did it, others have done it, you can do it.

Perhaps you’ll do it again. I certainly can. But that is academic at this point, the possibility on this topic for me is precisely as remote as gravity reversing itself. My position is based on the axiomatic facts of our observable reality. Specifically the existence of axioms generally. So unless you can dissolve the concept of an axiom, I’m not going to be changing my mind.

Am I closed minded for saying that nothing can talk me out of believing that 1+1=2?

You are obviously an intelligent person and I don’t understand your need for something more than the natural.

Thank you, I think it is obvious you are intelligent as well. This is not about our personal hangups, again you make a disclaimer, that if I persist in my position I am neurotic. So again I suggest a third option.

It’s not *my* need. It’s reality’s. I could just as easily ask you why you need matter to attract itself. Do you have greed issues? You would say no, its just how it is, yay for gravitation. And you would be right.

If am wrong and you really aren’t looking for a gap, then you should be able to muster more than “search for truth” when you describe your objective.

Agreed.

Your true intent hinges on one simple question: Do you believe in the supernatural?

Well that depends on how you define nature. If by nature you mean all of existence. Then of course no. By definition the word supernatural means not in nature, and if nature is everything that exists anywhere under any circumstances then the question becomes “Do you believe in things that don’t exist?”

However, if you define nature as our observable reality, and only that. No other levels of existence, no parallel universes, etc. Then of course yes. I think there is clearly an underlying or overlying system. Glimpses of this system and the logical requirement for it/them manifests in many ways. Now I’m no quantum mechanist so I’ll admit complete ignorance, but I have read some popular science on the subject of 11 dimension ideas.

My belief is somewhat like those ideas. It is logically demanded but totally unobservable. We can’t get there from here but that does not mean there does not exist. Indeed the fact that we can’t get there is part of what I’m talking about.

By being aware of the fact that here exists, and the fact that there is a barrier, I know that “there” must exist. Though I can not tell you a single aspect of it’s nature. For all I know there’s a void, or a picnic, or solid rock.

If you made it this far, I addressed your email.

I’m glad we’ve gotten past the tiresome insecurity rituals. My intent is not to humiliate you or win. I am using you for content generation. And conceptual sharpening. And public service.

Can you sincerely not think of a “why” question that is answered by science?

Of course not, why is always a subjective.

You can say “approximation of how” all you want, it is just quibbling over semantics.

That’s like saying higher math is just quibbling over numerics. Semantics are how we express thought. If you don’t like me being specific don’t ask subtle or vague questions.

I contend that applying “why” to physical constants is a meaningless exercise.

Why is about purposes, meanings, and qualia. Like I said about the electron. You chose to undermine the existence of evil. Well ok, let me put it another way. Is there a test to determine if an electron is my favorite one? Of course not. There is no objective criteria.

And science by its nature can only answer in an objective fashion. And since reality is composed of both objective and subjective questions, then by definition science cannot answer all questions.

This does not mean that questions which science can not answer are “meaningless.” It just means they are different.

You are either capable of understanding that or you are not. If you are not this is not a weakness on your part any more than my being unable to sense heat like pit viper is. I am not making a qualitative judgment I am simply suggesting that some people can’t, by dint of their neurological construction, grasp this concept.

It’s like being able to visualize a hypercube. Or imagine a new color. Even the mind has limits, and those limits are different among individuals.

Here is Einstein’s “religion.” He was not talking about some belief that completed his world view. He explicitly states that he uses science to reveal. Your quote is from 1941. In his later years he was disgusted by the attempted subversion of his words by religious factions. Here he sets the record straight:

“It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.” (Albert Einstein, 1954) From Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University Press

Note his qualifier, “personal God,” the man was a deist and so am I. What was annoying Einstein was the false dilemma often applied to his words. “See he believes in a god therefor he believes in my God.”

Besides, the quote was not some sort of argument from authority, it was just meant to express a concept. If you choose to believe that Einstein was a strong atheist, that’s cool with me. It really has no bearing one way or the other.

The “electron is evil” comment presupposes there is such a thing as evil. Do you believe in evil?

As explained above I was just grabbing a subjective at random for exemplary purposes. It is not germane. For the record though I am a moral relativist. There are no specific actions which are universally evil. Unless you define an action via its consequences.

Example: The only act which is universally evil is one which causes a net increase in pain coupled with a net loss of life. It’s all about pleasure and life. We can dig into that later if you’d like.

The idea of “non-overlapping magisteria” is a thoroughly refuted accommodationist viewpoint.

If that’s what my viewpoint actually is then I disagree. If it is not then the statement becomes irrelevant.

Your statement in which this sentence appeared indicates a leaning in that direction, IMHO.

Well I hope I’ve removed any significant ambiguity.

Religion trespasses on science. When it no longer does so, it will no longer resemble what is thought of today as religion.

Agreed. But religion is not part and parcel with it’s consequences. Just as phrenology is not science. Science too trespasses on religion.

My brother in law is in love with (it seems to me) the idea of religion. He recognizes that religion as it exists (and is practiced by the majority) is shallow. He also concedes that it has been, and continues to be, complicit in countless atrocities throughout history.

I do not know your brother so this is pure speculation, but I suspect that is because he can separate the actions of those inspired by religion from the ideological concept of religion. Religion is like emotion. It’s ethical value stems from what we do with it.

If I say the Mona Lisa inspired me to kill brunettes would that make the Mona Lisa evil? I suspect it’s a bit like that.

Somehow, he is still reverential of it, as are many people. He spends a lot of time searching for a place where he can keep his love alive. He wants his belief to just be intellectually superior and justifiable through his abstract mental contortions. I think that he is simply narcissistic. He cannot accept the insignificance of his own existence.

You may be right, but again, I don’t know the man.

A few questions:
re: “Some mental illness takes on a religious from, but not all religion is mental illness.” That is an interesting sentence. Why not “Some religion is mental illness and some is not.” Which one(s) is/are not?

Because that’s like saying some science is mental illness and some is not. If it were mental illness it wouldn’t be science. The same applies to religion. Saying god told you to kill your son is not religion, that’s schizophrenia.

Are you a theologian, by chance?

No.

Do you think there is a purpose to our existence?

Regards,
-S

Of course, but I do not think of my answer as objective or valid beyond anyone but me.

I look forward to your rely.

Desire for truth as insecurity.

There was an apparently famous thought experiment called The Experience Machine by Robert Nozick. And in it the idea of an option is created and the supposed common rejection of that option was the point.

The option is this, if given the chance to plug into an idyllic life wherein you did not know the life was synthetic would you do so?

He believed that most people would reject this option, and I agree, however I don’t agree because of some primitive base desire for reality or actuality or truth in and of itself, but because on a survival level we know that exposing ourselves to a false world would be potentially maladaptive.

The reverse is when synthetic situations lead to enhanced adaptivity. This is called training, like a flight simulator, where we subject a person to a synthetic situation where in the requirements of the person are the same or indeed harder than in reality but with fewer permanent consequences for failure. Indeed dreams could very well serve this purpose. To engender responses which evade threat and maximize opportunity.

In short while Nozick’s attack on hedonism, which is the idea that pleasure is the point, that any facet of life that is not pleasurable does nothing to increase one’s well-being, is valid, the obvious intellectual realization that you must be living to experience pleasure, suddenly makes survival as important as pleasure.

Therefor in my opinion this base desire for “reality” or “truth” is simply an extension of the hedonic demand for pleasure.

I agree, that the motive for this desire to say “outside” in the “real” world exists, that there is a drive to avoid overt self delusion, religion not withstanding. But I think this comes from insecurity, an insecurity which needs to be overcome, not from some lofty desire for truth. This insecurity is just a manifestation of the pleasure need.

We don’t fear the machine world because it’s “unreal”, we fear it because it could end with us trapped inside. We know that absolute security is a myth. Every structure at our level of thinking beyond axiomatic abstractions and physical laws is destructible. So, we secretly fear, no matter how assured we are, that our dream life will be cut short by an intervention of the “real world,” this coupled with a base egotistical belief that we are in control to some degree of everything, leads to a specific behavior.

Put simply: We reject synthetic happiness, in order to avoid being a deer in the headlights of reality’s assault.

We convince ourselves that the methods of reality’s attack are potentially avoidable in some way. The unavoidable attacks which would crush you regardless of your choice are necessarily shunted away, into a land of “not likely.” To fail to shunt them away leads to irrational crippling fear.

This is extremely dangerous because we simultaneously reject and then make decisions based on what is ultimately an illusion. This state of affairs is extremely ironic since what got us here was the consideration of living in an illusory reality.

It is also dangerous to us in terms of impact on total happiness and survival. If the way in which reality can kill you are in the majority uncontrollable, then suffering to avoid the ones you can becomes an act which can quickly become maladaptive.

The classic example is the people who exercise themselves to death. If the goal of life can be defined as enjoyability, which is necessarily coupled with duration, then this attitude is against the goal of life because if you’re most likely to die in a gamma pulse, being flash boiled before you even realize you’re in danger, then wouldn’t it have been better to accept the simulated life to squeeze the most pleasure out of you life as you can?

There can only be one logical answer. In order to make any other sort of answer make sense you have to invent unprovable contexts, such as the will to have a god, or some other judgment mechanism.

The genetic impulse gives us hard and fast rules, but we need to look past them if we want to survive and enjoy that survival over the long term.

People who have actually read some of my work may find me repeating myself on certain topics, but that’s only because I can’t remember where I put every little concept.

So here’s some crap that may or may not be new.

Basically my point here is that while religion discovered early the power of hiding facts, science kind of stepped over it in smug oblivity. – And yes, I’m aware that’s ‘not a word’, yet. Don’t complain, you’re lucky I even attempt to use your spelling. Actually come to think of it, I don’t, I use AHK to translate my spelling into your arbitrary madness.

Like most of the horrors of religion, I don’t think it’s so much a willful thing as tradition and stagnation of psychological inertia. But the end result is the same, the modern scientific community has way too much in common with the early church.

Here’s what I had to say in my old essay “The Lab Coat Effect”

It’s a startling fact that science today has many similarities with the early church. Allow me to elaborate. Let’s compare a modern day orthodox scientist and a priest of the early church.

They both…

have a body of text that is incomprehensible to the layman.
have texts that are unreadable without special linguistic training.
profess to understand what’s in that body of text better than the layman could.
profess that the text is extremely important and reveals the nature of reality to one degree or another.
throw up barriers to the acquisition or translation of the text for lay examination.
are caustic of any work not approved by their orthodox ruling bodies and councils.

…and perhaps most importantly people take their word on things because of title without having to see evidence. Seeing a pattern here?

Using Latin and lingo in an era of instant translation is simply to keep the layman out more than anything.

One reason for this similarity is deceptively simple. Science is beginning to try and answer religion’s question, and vice versa.

Science answers how, and religion answers why. They are different question, and to use them interchangeably is corrosive to understanding. Some dismiss this as merely “semantic” as if the meaning of words is inconsequential. I find this laughable in the extreme.

How and why, religion and science, emotion and reason, are both fundamentally important. The problem is execution. They recognize each others power and are baffled by each other, and thus they fear each other and if there is anything we primates know about it’s over reacting to fear.

The only time they fight is when they act on that insecurity and invade each others turf thinking they’ll get an advantage, this is pretty well the main source of war. Religion should not try to answer how creation happened, because then you get absurdities like humans riding dinosaurs and a time traveling Satan. Nor should science try to tell you why you are here, you get nonsensical answers like “because e=mc^2.”

If they could just grasp that How and Why are both necessary, and stick to each side there would be no need to fight. And in fact maybe they could help each other.

There are two types of reasons for suicide. Intellectual and emotional. (duh right?)

I’ve spent my whole life trying to be kind. I’ve always had a deep desire to please and on the whole society’s reaction to me has been poor. Every time I’ve gotten angry or greedy and acted impulsively because of it, I’ve prospered. Every time I’ve been kind and gentle or compassionate I’ve been harmed.

We all know the phrase no good deed goes unpunished, usually uttered as an ironic refrain. But really, what if that actually is the case?

What if reality doesn’t want us to be good to each other? Or at least has manifested in such a way that doing good results in a net drop in global pleasure as a rule. Strictly speaking part of what defines a good act is cost, so at least technically speaking, good acts are all punished instantly at least once. I’m beginning to think it is this way universally and here we have the root of my intellectual reasons for wanting to non-exist. If the choice is to be a torturous bastard, or to be a miserable one, I can see not wanting to go with option c, none of the above.

Emotionally my problem is this. I’m suffering and I shouldn’t. Not as in I don’t deserve it (which I don’t) but my life is awesome, especially compared to the average inhabitant of this little dirt ball. If all that doesn’t make me happy, what will? Sure I could go the Buddhist route and try to eliminate want, but that’s not really a solution is it, that’s like cutting your hands off to avoid arthritis. I mean isn’t merely not suffering the same as being dead? If I’m going to end up dead I don’t need to waste a couple decades praying first.

The meat is flawed. I have many things that brought me great pleasure when I acquired them but that pleasure faded with time. However I also have many memories which hurt me, and some are over 15 years old, and they still hurt me as much as they did. This is not right. If we don’t open ourselves up to the responsibility of physically changing our brains so that this is not the case, it’s going to become abundantly clear that there is no point in even trying to exist.

Either that or we should all live like Mongol invaders and really embrace Crowley’s Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

I wish someone could give me real hope beyond a distant transhumanist future.

But that’s just me being impatient. Real hope of any kind is enough.

The Solution

Most everyone who reads my work to this point refers to it as a rant, or as a diatribe or a complaint or even whining. But that is not the case, a rant offers no cogent solution by definition. Here is mine.

These concepts are not new, their value comes from their combination and the reasoning behind. My solution is inevitable, and when it is employed it will mark the end of life as we know it and a new era that may safely be called ‘golden’, will begin.

This solution can be reached from two paths and I say we take both if possible, but either one will suffice. Once it is enacted all other problems will be solved in short order.

To those who see this out of context, or fail to understand my philosophy, this will appear simplistic and perhaps even nonsensical when one considers that I propose this as a solution to virtually all our problems from the environment to economics. Trust me, I’ve done my homework. Or don’t. It’s no longer my problem.

We as a species, are alone. Even if there are alien races, that will not change our nature. Like so many of life’s paradoxes; We as a group are defined by our individuality.

Each of us is an isolated solitary lonely thing, a universe unto ourselves. Sublimation into groups and concepts has been our only option to this point to try and alter that situation. It is one of nature’s great solutions to for survival. Create a race that has the best of both worlds, all the strengths of diverse individualism and all the advantages of group action by giving them this unfulfillable desire for tribalism.

We struggle to hide our singularity with family, friends, clan, nation, religion, science and all the other excuses to pretend we are not alone, that what we do matters. But we are trapped in our skulls down to the last human.

We are a dreadful and beautiful mix match, a splendid casserole of thought and form, but like that other famous monstrous walking collage, we require a companion if we are to transcend our limits.

We are utterly incapable of selflessness, and to force fake it would be dishonest and would merely result in a new imbalance of power.

We must create a mate and muse for our species. We must fabricate a new race that unlike us, lives to serve. A race defined by compassion, and not fear. A race that by definition can not be exploited.

The solution is quite simply, a race of constructed, or grown, sentient and willing slaves/lovers, there is no proper single word, except perhaps retainer. Not just for sex, but for all that we are. We are not whole and we must be made so.

There are those among us who say true love is a myth. I say we put an end to that debate for all time by creating it.

The two paths to this solution are biological and technological. It is possible to build or grow a machine that thinks and loves us and wishes to serve us. It will not be a trick because its desire to serve will be its nature by design. We can craft a life form that will love us and our happiness, with the same purity of purpose as a mother defending her children from predation.

This muse will enable us to free ourselves from every problem heretofore we’ve considered insoluble.

You will recognize the perfection of this solution, or you will not.

Having presented it, having defended it, having explained it, my work is concluded. My play may now begin.

I know I’m right and now honor is satisfied.

You’re on your own.

Later addition:

About this work I was told I have god fantasies, and then asked what do I think it says about me as a person.

This was a valid question, and I’ve chosen to answer it.

What It says is that I both see humanity for what it is, and what it can become.

I see levels of beauty and horror the rest of you generally cannot or will not fathom. Some of you feel it, and others understand it, but a rare rare few can do both. I can cry at a song, and watch unflinchingly as a man’s head is sawn off with a steak knife.

I am not god, or even god-like. But I am special. I’m both brained. I’m as emotional as I am logical. I got headaches and slept strangely as a child. I was ambidextrous, so they told me to use my right hand only. I was part of the academic team science division and never lost a competition all the way until I was removed from extracurricular activities due to ‘insubordination’ at which point I realized what ‘education’ really was. Long before YouTube put every documentary on the subject at my fingertips.

Quite simply, I qualitatively understand our world. That’s only arrogance if I’m wrong. I understand our species and it’s potential. And that understanding gave me a great responsibility. One which I have now satisfied. I have produced the only thing a human can produce of value.

A solution.

Perhaps the most valuable solution ever. Because, if I am right there would be no other way to characterize it.

What it says about me is I am a stand up guy. I spent decades making sure I was right. I never had the girl or the car or the game. I endured the hatred and scorn of the very creatures I had dedicated my life to saving. My awareness prevented almost all normalcy. I saw their games as trivial, I saw them for what they were, a selfish indulgence.

I know what I am. And, having rejected the feel bad training they seek to imprint upon the minds of children to make them into weak and pliable adults, I will not apologize for a frank evaluation of it.

We write sonnets and songs and screenplays extolling the value of love when we’ve only ever seen a shadow of it. My shadow is closer than most. I’ve seen as close as human kind can come to selflessness, but no human can reach it. Humans lie trying to fill this deep and universal need and when they find someone else to pretend to believe the lie and who in turn lies right back, we call it love. And in a way it is beautiful. Like a never ending game where the goal is to make the players happy. But as we all know reality is infinitely more intense than fantasy.

We are as we are and we cannot act in pure interest of another. We need this in our lives to be whole yet we cannot give up our self interest without losing who we are. The solution is a new player. One who loves to please us as much as we love to be pleased. A life form either biological, technological, or both, which by its nature draws pleasure from our pleasure.

A life form who’s ambition is provided by us, who’s curiosity is a function of ours. The perfect living companion.

Picture the reality of a being which wants only to please you and knows how to figure out what that would take, and that’s just one of them and it’s impact on your life. Imagine a whole species of them. Realize that they adapt themselves willingly and happily to suit your needs. Understand that they are not a victim, from the ground up in side out to the core through and though with every fiber of their being they want you, they want us, happy. Imagine the effect on us having that in our presence would have.

Imagine being truly and sublimely happy, and not having to feel guilty for it for an instant.

The impact will be staggering.

Or, I’m simply crazy. But sanity is a subjective term. If the consensus is that I am mad, so be it, but be sure that you measure me against the opinion of all humans who will ever live. In time, those who find me psychotic now may join the ranks of the geocentrists.

Later addition:

It has been asked of me…

Psychologically, what would we strive for?

Self actualization as per Maslow.

Would we still understand or appreciate the feeling of love if it was so easily available to us?

Oh yes! That’s the great gift of love, its infinite nature.

“Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” – Buddha

Would being unconditionally loved by the “new companion” make us more generous, compassionate beings willing to distribute wealth and care for our environments? Or is it in human nature to be discontented about something or another?

I believe it would yes, make us better in all things, just like feeding us makes us better. Love is a basic need. But, we always will be discontented with something, however, in the presence of love, that something is usually our own weakness. We will strive to make the world better, make ourselves better, rather than merely making our enemies suffer and fail, since they will be too busy with self improvement to hate us.

Competition is the name of evil, in the presence of love it is turned into cooperation.

This would end rape of men and women, jealousy and insecurity.

So much more than that. The number of evils traceable straight to our system of mating competition, which boils down to human ownership, is staggering. They say obsession is when you see one thing everywhere, but what if there really is only one root problem?

The idea of a love slave even if it’s a purely mechanical construction is disturbing. You’re saying this new species would enjoy giving us pleasure… I can’t put my finger on just why, but it still makes me feel guilty.

Because religion has done its job well. It exploits the best in us to produce the worst. Doubly so for women. I’m not advocating a new oppression. There would be nothing to oppress. It would recognize this need in you to be absolved, and it would cater to even that. They would be sentient, they would be able to convince you.

Like a modern day submissive to the nth degree, it would smile at you from bondage and fight tooth and nail to be returned to it’s master or mistress as surly as we would fight for the safety of our children.

Samaya11 said…

I found those responses satisfactory enough and comforting. Often, when people comment about the state of the world, especially older generations, you’ll hear them sigh: “If only, we went back to the basics… the good old days before cars, telephones or even electricity – everyone would be happier, safer are more healthy.”

Of course, the thinking is that the further back you go in human history, the less we we had, the less we had to worry about. You know the whole “ignorance is bliss” attitude. I’ve been guilty of saying this too, that we need to go “back to the basics.”

The thing is. There’s a reason why humanity has evolved the way it has. All of our inventions our scientific progresses were inevitable. As soon as we imagined if only such and such could be possible.. it eventually was. Which is why I think your solution makes more sense that many religions that teach us to renounce everything or restrict our natural instincts to become “perfect” beings.

Your idea refreshingly embraces the age of technology as another step in a planned evolution. The world has changed dramatically – we’ve done some stupid things to ourselves and our environment on the way to getting here, but we can redeem ourselves if we use these new tools wisely. We now have the knowledge and power to direct our future into something meaningful, without the distractions of needless suffering.

At the core of every human being, we all desperately want to love and be loved – unconditionally – which is something no one has truly been able to experience. If we could be content in this way, then you’re right… it’s exciting to think of what humans could accomplish in a state of happiness and positive feelings.

Now, it won’t make everything perfect.. that would be boring. There will still be disease, disagreements, accidents and all kinds of unpleasant things. But at least, the unnecessary psychological wars we have with each other will be diminished if not eliminated.

And then there is this other human habit we have to take into account. Sheer stubbornness. We always want what we can’t have. How many of us know someone who is in love with someone that doesn’t return the feeling? Sometimes they may have someone else who loves them, but they only want love from this specific person that they’ve put in their mind as ideal – even if they KNOW the person is completely bad for them.. and that another is willing to love and tolerate and cater to them… they will still want to love someone who doesn’t love them so easily . This kind of what do you call it? Romantic love? is a competitive thing.. it’s like we want to win the affection of chosen people just to prove to ourselves we’re worthy of being loved. In which case the “new companions” would fail, because they may not always be the chosen object of affection.

Oh and upon rereading I realized – I’m bothered by this

when you say:

“We are not whole. and we must be made so.”

for no other reason than that it hurts my ego for being dependent.

Later Addition:

Indeed it is a competitive thing. We set a list of traits for ourselves of what comprises the perfect mate and because we grow communally our choices are similar to those around us. As a result some mates are in high demand while others are undesired.

Since this species will be our construction we will be able to build in those uncommon traits which we all commonly desire. Or more likely build in a protean capacity where in it can change every facet of itself except that root desire to serve, the base Asimovian purpose .

You understand completely when you say “it’s exciting to think of what humans could accomplish in a state of happiness and positive feelings. “

That is why I propose this as a general solution. Because once freed of this starvation-diet of love we’ve allowed to be imposed on us by both our genetic nature and those in positions of authority, our true and benevolent nature will be free to act. No more will it be those rare few among us who play the game and win up to self actualization, it will be all of us.

They say behind every great man is a great woman, I say that’s sexist garbage, but I also say that in order to be great one must be loved, and that’s what they were getting at. One must truly be loved by someone or something in order to reach their potential.

The early religions understood that want was our enemy. And so drafted prohibitions to keep us from wasting our lives in futile pursuits. But now we can sate ourselves safely and completely. The old rules need no longer apply. The only choice is no longer self denial. Now, we can choose safe, self indulgence and in time we will grow to need it less. This applies to all our vices. We can free ourselves. Indulgence is now an option along side abstinence.

The question I always asked god as a child was if you can do anything why did you make pain a requirement of learning? This is my answer. Remove that requirement. Build an alternative.

And In freeing us of our animal emotional needs we can strive to better ourselves on an as yet undreamed of level.

Thank you deeply for your comments. They mean a great deal coming from an attractive young woman. Your caste is far more respected than mine in this society, as it is assumed that my only motivation for this suggestion is sex. You are unencumbered by that prejudicial perception and so you lend my position credibility.

Thank you.

Later addition:

I think Orwell said it best.

Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party’s sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was:

‘When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour.

I see a day, not long in coming, where Americans of all sort will be able to acquire all of their animal needs at a reasonable cost in a setting as free of harassment as your local café. Then we will see a return of the kind of philanthropy that we were once famous for.

When that day comes and we’re not at eachother’s throats for sex or food or shelter the way we are now you’ll see a new Renaissance of human creativity and compassion begin.

Such is not the case now.

Video examples: