[PREV - THE_NEW_FLESH]    [TOP]

BY_INCHES

                                    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
two 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
 However repellent the
 extremes described by       Many people, contemplating the possiblity of
 Ettinger, each little       immortality are inclined to intone
 step toward either end      philosophically about how it would be quite
 of Ettinger's scale         boring, and make living seem pointless.
 might seem attractive.
                                       And yet, given the opportunity to
    And the way these things go,       fight for another decade, few seem
    you might expect people to go      inclined to turn it down.
    in both directions at once,
    at an uneven, halting pace.              You may doubt the value of
                                             immortality, but human beings
    An extra orifice or appendage            will continue to crawl
    or two, and a memory upgrade             toward it whenever possible.
    to store all those sonnets.


         Remember: it didn't
         take long for tit jobs
         to go from scandalous       Or nearly standard,
         to standard.                in some circles,
                                     certainly in some
                                     professions.


--------
[NEXT - CAUTIONARY]