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BEYOND_REST

                                    October 7, 2008
                                    March  18, 2009

There's a book by Ettinger that
speculates about what we now might
call the "post-human" fate of humanity.

On the subject of love and/or sex he takes
the two competing (contrasting?) views of
what they're about, and exaggerates them
into cartoon futures, two possible scenarios
of where human beings could go, given the
will to vary the parameters that underly
the present state of humanity.


One vision maxes out physical interaction,
imagining new bodies studded with convex and
concave organs designed to fit into each
other and rub against each other.

The other vision maxes out on emotional
interaction, imagining beings that feel no
need to touch, but rather recite soulful
romantic poetry to each other.

His point (if I remember correctly) is that
which ever ideal you embrace would lead to
a resolve to modify human nature-- once you
grasp that human nature has a physical
substrate that can indeed be modified.



   The interesting thing
   is that neither extreme         To me.
   seems very interesting.                 How about you?

     Maybe that's a           IRONTHORN.html
     characteristic
     of end points.
                        EXTREMES

           Many people, contemplating the
           possiblity of immortality are
           inclined to intone philosophically
           about how it would be quite boring,
           and make living seem pointless.

           And yet, given the opportunity to
           fight for another decade, few seem
           inclined to turn it down.


                 You may doubt the value of
                 the extreme of immortality,
                 but human beings will
                 continue to crawl toward it
                 whenever possible.


     However meaningless the
     end points described by
     Ettinger, each little
     step toward either end            And the way these things go,
     of Ettinger's scale               you might expect people to go
     might seem attractive.            in both directions at once,
                                       at an uneven, halting pace.

                                              An extra orifice or appendage
                                              or two, and a memory upgrade
                                              to store all those sonnets.


                                                   Remember: it didn't
                                                   take long for tit
                                                   jobs to go from
                                                   scandalous to standard.


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