Reclusland

Well, this is only just making it in as my post-for-the day today, but in my defense, I’ve been working on what’s turning into a very long post on organization, top-down power, and the death drive.  That’ll hopefully be up in a day or two, but in the meantime, here’s a quick little triage post…

This one was going to be about Desire, Love (that’s an earlier version of the Lovers card. See Cupid with his bow? Not sure why he’s aiming at three people though…), and whether or not these are things we should be trying to control.  I did find a lot of links on this, but it going to require a lot of research to bring together anything worth saying.  Besides, I’m not sure if anything could really change my mind on the subject anyway.  It’s called “falling” in love for a reason, and making someone, even yourself, do it is to miss the entire point of the whole adventure…

Eliezer Yudkowsky, from Overcoming Bias, starts things off  by explaining our need for a “Justified Expectation of Pleasant Surprises”, or why sometimes it’s better not to know something in advance:
Imagine living in two possible worlds.  Both worlds are otherwise rich in challenge, novelty, and other aspects of Fun.  In both worlds, you get smarter with age and acquire more abilities over time, so that your life is always getting better. But in one world, the abilities that come with seniority are openly discussed, hence widely known; you know what you have to look forward to. In the other world, anyone older than you will refuse to talk about certain aspects of growing up; you’ll just have to wait and find out. I ask you to contemplate – not just which world you might prefer to live in – but how much you might want to live in the second world, rather than the first.  I would even say that the second world seems more alive; when I imagine living there, my imagined will to live feels stronger.  I’ve got to stay alive to find out what happens next, right?

From Futurismic, a question as to whether continued development or happiness should be considered a primary goal of civilization:
…how will society change when people are free to choose their personalities at a whim? In fact, could that be the solution to the Fermi Paradox? Could it be that all technological civilizations advance to the point where they develop a technique for inducing whatever their alien equivalent of permanent happiness is and then stop developing?

To which I would add, can development, along any lines, ever ephemeralize into a state of permanent happiness?  If it can, then shoud it?  And please, no knee-jerk reactions about “permanent bliss = death!”  It’s a more complicated question than that.  For example, what if there was a way to accomplish this where it didn’t “equal death”?

Things get a little more complicated with help from the ever popular Physorg:
Women with high levels of a key sex hormone are judged more attractive by themselves and others, and may be more inclined to cheat on their partners, according to a study published Wednesday.  University of Texas psychologists Kristina Durante and Norman Li found that women with high concentrations of the hormone oestradiol were likelier to flirt, kiss and have a serious affair outside an established relationship.  In a study published in the British journal Biology Letters, the duo described the behaviour as “opportunistic serial monogamy” and not related to one-night stands.

Does it worry anyone else that this might one day become as easy as popping a pill?  Not that I want to stop people from doing whatever they feel they need to, but still…  What does taking a pill to make oneself more likly to flirt, more attractive to others, and more likely to cheat say about you, and at what point would someone decide to stop taking such a pill?   Would it become addictive?  And what value do you gain by consciously chosing something that is considered by society to be a more instictual choice?

Well, the New York Times has a little something that might work with the above to make things more interesting:
In the new issue of Nature, the neuroscientist Larry Young offers a grand unified theory of love. After analyzing the brain chemistry of mammalian pair bonding — and, not incidentally, explaining humans’ peculiar erotic fascination with breasts — Dr. Young predicts that it won’t be long before an unscrupulous suitor could sneak a pharmaceutical love potion into your drink. That’s the bad news. The not-so-bad news is that you may enjoy this potion if you took it knowingly with the right person. But the really good news, as I see it, is that we might reverse-engineer an anti-love potion, a vaccine preventing you from making an infatuated ass of yourself. Although this love vaccine isn’t mentioned in Dr. Young’s essay, when I raised the prospect he agreed it could also be in the offing.  Could any discovery be more welcome? This is what humans have sought ever since Odysseus ordered his crew to tie him to the mast while sailing past the Sirens. Long before scientists identified neuroreceptors, long before Britney Spears’ quickie Vegas wedding or any of Larry King’s seven marriages, it was clear that love was a dangerous disease.

But again, the bad news is that someone might actually be able to force you to fall in love with them, and the  good news is that we might never have to give in to love again, unless it’s convenient?  I don’t know about you, but the undertones there don’t sit at all well with me…

Because hey, the society that’s going to be using these drugs has a piss-poor understanding of how hormones even work, let alone what they do and don’t help us with.  Again, from Physorg:
Scientists doubted that hormones could even enter the brain until the 1960s, and since then, most have maintained a dogma that they are only involved in reproductive aspects of brain function, McEwen says. On this question, McEwen is a proud heretic. “We know that sex hormones are active in the entire nervous system, both in sexual differentiation and in terms of the activation of neurological, cognitive and emotional processes,” McEwen says.

We’re messing around with something that 50 years ago we didn’t even think really touched us, and yet which we now know is active in the entire nervous system?  Doesn’t that point out that maybe we’re exploring these things in the wrong direction?  To me, it seems like things such as these could really only be used to control things that we should be listening to instead.  Unless that’s the whole point: luring the forcefully lovesick into traps. Then again, maybe it’s something we could use to get better control over the financial industry?

Either way, I think we need more people exploring these things, to find out how they actually do work already, to help us make more informed choices as a species.  People like Meredith Chivers, creator of bonobo pornography.