Wireheading
I heard a broadcast between EDJCB and Owen Cyclops, trippy cartoonist extraordinaire. Owen is sorta like a young version of Bruce Charlton on drugs. His book is great, you can get it on Amazon.
But the book’s too raw for kids. He talks honestly about being addicted to porn and having soul-deadening fornication and there are non-titillating drawings that go with it. It was a bit much for me, Ned Flanders extraordinaire that I am.
***
Anyhow in the podcast they talk a bit about wireheading.
What if you could take a drug (or have an electrode net fire into your brain or whatever hokum has sufficient veneer of scientific plausibility to take the question seriously) and you felt at all times perfect bliss, sense of meaning and accomplishment, the glory of victory, all of this perfectly at all times, even though in the flesh you were a dirty junky slowly withering away?
My first thought is to reject the hypothetical. The soul and the body are inseparably connected. It is IMPOSSIBLE to have the experience of perfect bliss, meaning, glory, etc., and have a body that is wasting away. The impossibility is written into the structure of the universe. Blast and damn the modern heresy that what we really are is our minds.
But even if the impossible were true, you should still reject the wirehead. Because the utmost joy, accomplishment, meaning, victory, and glory that you can now experience to the full is a drop compared to what you will be able to experience as your capacities expand. Your suffering, tedium, and imperfect joy now is necessary to the joy you will have then, the joy so great it will lift worlds and inflate universes.
Filed under: We transcend your bourgeois categories | No Tag
bruce charlton
October 13, 2022
” sorta like a young version of Bruce Charlton on drugs”
The “sorta like” is doing a lot of work in that sentence!
(And the “drugs” would need to have made some pretty radical changes too; if the young BC was to be shaped-into resembling the current OC…)
As for the *current* BC: he feels like he is on a different wavelength – if not a different planet! – from OC.
G.
October 13, 2022
Fair enough
jacob G.
October 13, 2022
I too struggle to see the similarity bc&oc. I suppose they are both friends of mormons, and going their own way after having rejected a form of worldliness that appealed to them at one point. But their own way is quite different, and the exact worldliness that once appealed is quite different.
Nitpick aside, isn’t strange from the materialist POV how they’ve never found a drug whose high isn’t followed by a crash?
G.
October 13, 2022
I didn’t think the comparison would be wildly popular. Glad to see my expectations are confirmed.