The Connection Between Stimuli and Pleasure/Pain is Arbitrary, an Objective Fact that Has Relatively Little to Do with One’s Personal Tech Habits Monday, Oct 19 2009
futurism and humor and philosophy 2:35 pm
My thoughts on sex after the Singularity were picked up by a blogger on CNET, Chris Matyszczyk, so I thought I’d react a little bit. He writes:
Indeed, Retrevo’s findings are so disturbing that I wonder whether the roboticists are right to suggest that sex should be a matter of adjusting one’s own chemistry rather than attempting to consort with another human. To wit, in the words of blogger Michael Anissimov, one of the “leading thinkers in the radical tech community” who were invited to pontificate in the lustrous pages of H Plus magazine: “The connection between certain activities and the sensation of pleasure lies entirely in our cognitive architecture, which we will eventually manipulate at will.”
I am haunted by the drastic prognostications by the salivators over The Singularity about the future of sex. Indeed, some words of Anissimov are rattling around my head like those of a particularly angry former lover. Speaking of this beautiful future, he said: “I could make any experience in the world highly pleasurable or highly displeasurable. I could make sex suck and staring at paint drying the greatest thing ever.”
I’m not trying to sell a particular future. It is a physical fact about our brains that the connections between stimuli and pleasure/displeasure are arbitrary and exist mostly for evolutionary reasons. There is no fundamental reason why we won’t eventually be able to play around with them. This is a fact that has existed in the abstract since the dawn of brains — I didn’t make it up. Ever since the first nervous systems evolved, their pleasure/pain-stimuli connections had to be directed by evolution and natural selection.
The point of my comments in that sex article is that these connections are arbitrary and we will eventually modify them if we wish, because the mind is not magical, it’s “just” a machine. Matyszczyk’s slightly uncomfortable reaction to this objective fact shows that he hasn’t been exposed to it enough. The alternative to my position is projectionism — pretending that certain features of reality, like sex, are inherently fun rather than fun because evolution made it that way. There is nothing wrong with understanding that things are fun or not fun primarily because we evolved to interpret them as such. No activity is inherently anything. Amusement parks are not inherently fun, they’re just fun because of the complex interactions between external stimuli and our brains. An alien from the Pleiades, or even certain human beings, might find an amusement park horrifying.
Drawing a connection between realizing the arbitrary linkage between stimuli and pleasure and the report he cited, which simply suggests that 35% or something of people under 35 check Twitter “after sex”, is foolish. One is an abstract philosophical/cognitive science issue, the other has to do with technophilia among people under middle age. I can be a person who realizes the arbitrary linkage between stimuli and pleasure and be the most “human-like” dude you can imagine, like one of the inhabitants of Zion in that incredibly lame party scene at the beginning of the second Matrix movie.
It is also very foolish to suggest that just because someone offers their thoughts on sex after the Singularity, that one is “salivating” over the Singularity, or whatever. I have a very well-rounded and healthy life, similar to many of the “well-adjusted” stiffs who squirm awkwardly in their chairs whenever conversation moves to topics more abstract than the latest tech gossip, the latest episode of Mad Men, or the wine and food. I have no idea if Matyszczyk really thinks like that, but condemning me to “salivation” for spending 10 minutes writing down my thoughts on sex after the Singularity is not a good sign. There seems to be some assumption that if someone is interested in any significant way in a non-mainstream topic, then they must be “obsessed” or “salivating” over it. It seems like a not-so-subtle way of socially punishing people who have the gall to focus on non-mainstream topics.
Indeed, I don’t even see what’s so wrong about checking Twitter “after sex”. The statement elicits a mental image of someone dashing right away from sex to checking Twitter, but that is misleading. This is just shock imagery that makes it easier to promote your study. Maybe you’re someone that has sex several times a day, and if you spent half an hour each time after sex staring into your partner’s eyes and chatting lovingly, you would never have a chance to really check out Twitter. Maybe older people make a bigger deal out of sex because they have it less often. If it isn’t offensive to start reading a book or (heaven forbid) watch television 5-10 minutes after you’re done getting it on, then why the hell is it such a huge deal to check out Twitter? Maybe people actually like to move on to other things after they have sex, because they’re like, not as horny any more, because they just (surprise!) had sex. Jesus Christ.
You are using the word “arbitrary”, but the most natural way to use it seems to be irrelevant for the task, or more generally “morally irrelevant”. The connections between senses and experience is nothing like morally irrelevant. There are lots of possible contexts where it might make sense to change any given thing, and it’s certainly possible in principle to change any given thing (duh!), but that’s not what people hear when you say “arbitrary”. They hear you saying that you’d feel OK about making the change, including in the current context, and that’s incorrect about the examples you used.
I guess I mean arbitrary in the sense of the first definition on Google:
- “based on or subject to individual discretion or preference or sometimes impulse or caprice.”
Another good definition is given by Larry D’Anna in the LW thread:
- “could be anything, and will probably be chosen specifically to annoy you.”
…not arbitrary to me personally morally, or irrelevant to any task. But ultimately, I still can’t justify my stimuli/pleasure connections to any arbitrary being with an arbitrarily different motivational system other than saying “evolution made it that way”.
I understand what would fit your usage — my comment is on how the misinterpretation proceeds, and on scarcity of meaning in the word as it’s used.
It won’t be a justification, but an explanation of how we got there. You can’t justify anything to a concept of perfect emptiness — it’s pointless to use that as a criterion.
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