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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PiMac who wrote (33531)	3/30/1999 12:23:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

PiMac: There's so much here, so I will be selective and incomplete in my response. >How can we tinker with the fundamental structure of the species when we can not even work one [military] arm of it rationally<? I suggest that we cannot effectively address some of our maladaptive drives - war, greed - until we tinker with the organism. War, greed, all such things - are not fixed quantities but extensions of attitude. Some learned, and some hard-wired. The great emphasis now is on learned ethics and morality to provide a counterweight to greed, hate, contempt of the Other. It's the best we have, but such learning is at constant war with the inner monkey that wants to grab the biggest piece of the kill for self and family. The good adaptations/tinkerings will not be mechanistic in the clockwork universe sense. Damping (not necessarily outright excising, but rendering less compelling) bad emotion need not come at the price of all emotion, of aesthetic sensibility etc. The black&white morality tales like Orwell and Huxley are rooted in the simple clockwork mythos of the 19th century. I can't and won't predict what will work. i have great faith that humanity, even as it changes, will retain a vital and "good" human character. The basic drive to touch the Cosmos will be part of any successful new breed. It gives life beauty and meaning. You and I have an awareness of sociopathy without (I am hoping) being sociopaths. I do not propose to wipe out all impulse and understanding of greed or hate - but to still the compulsion to act that oversteps the bounds of a healthy member of society. Body, Soul, Spirit. Perhaps it is my natural philosopher's prejudice that I dismiss soul and spirit as a fiction of the priests. ("Priests" here can be Christian or Druid or Hinayana. I am an equal opportunity agnostic. :-) ) So I believe in body and mind - with mind thoroughly meshed in and dependent on body. > But with a body, the changes that affect one are both physical and experiential. Each effect adds to the complexity of the internal, 'real' you. So, I posit there are at least 3 factors that make up one's self--body, external sensations, current internal makeup. Further, I posit that there are aspects of each of these three which are required to be human.< All fully accepted. I am limiting my talk of soul to anything that extends its existence beyond this bottle - above and beyond the impressions we make upon the minds and hearts of other people. >We can create a successor race that looks better than us but has no need for human growth in understanding the world, each other, nor themselves. We will have succeeded in making the most powerful species, the species most our predator, extinct. We will be gone. Our 'children' will have no problems, and no humanity.< I don't think this way. On the most basic level - such a creature has no adaptive value, no survivability in a real world. Someone else will breed or build poet-warriors with unpredictable initiative - and any mechanistic society will be - not necessarily outsmarted, but outmaneuvered. I am not a mechanist. One of my articles of faith is that if I can think it through, it's incomplete. >Babies not touched die. Sensory deprivation kills. What experiments will be used to determine how little touch is required? What genes can then be manipulated to extend these limits?< Morally this is awful - and technically it is a dead end. What is learned with these exercises in clinical sadism? How is the goal of a better human animal advanced? I don't see this as the real problem. We'll start small - clean up the genes for cystic fibrosis, heritable cancer, Huntington's chorea. Then we will expand into physical conditions which affect the sense of self. Schizophrenia. Alzheimer's. These have simple mechanistically probe-able genetic roots, but the effevt on the human mind is real. We will learn, and we will set tentative limits. Only the criminally mad will deliberately seek to **** with the limits of mind. The Hippocratic principle will still guide the genomancers: Do No Harm. This will require ethical inquiry to keep pace with technical proficiency. It may prove necessary and prudent to build genetic analogs of the Oppenheimer and Teller-Ulam bombs ("atomic" and "hydrogen") in order to understand the dangers and defenses. I do not believe our current state of ethics, so deeply rooted in a clockwork mythos of the universe, is sufficient. >I did list 6 aspects of my complaint, not 1. < And I apologize for my inadvertently confrontational tone. I've missed some of your questions; perhaps after reading my ramblings above you'll pick the remaining 1 or 2 most important. My attention span ain't what it once was.

To: PiMac who wrote (33531)	3/30/1999 12:39:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

>Long ago I made many attempts to induce the psychedelic euphoria. How many bad trips does one take before saying enough, 3, 10? < My answer would be "two". The first one might be an aberration - but the second one is an unmistakable sign that This Ain't for You. I tolerate alcohol poorly - if I drink enough to be tangibly buzzed I'll feel really nasty the next day. Psychedelics go down easier for some than for others. There is an unavoidable surrender of all control and direction that goes with the psychedelic state. While we might be superficially, intellectually ready for this the reality is terrifying at a deep, essential level. Sometimes that terror never gets overlaid by the "reward" phase of the trip, and you get to spend a few hours in a complete and convincing metamodel of Hell. I brought up psychedelics because they (and their distant cousins the dissociatives) have this quality of "ego dissolution". You are no longer you. The body is there - the mind is just racing in idle - and the "soul" - the identity-kernel - is for the first time not in the saddle. Mind-blowing (a powerful phrase that has been trivialized into meaninglessness).