[extropy-chat] Pure Gossip: Who will Anders marry?

[Anders Sandberg]

Hughes, James J. wrote:
>> So let's plan a special session at Chicago dedicated to
>> finding a girlfriend, boyfriend, aifriend, vrfriend or
>> whateverfriend for Anders!
>
> Since he's a fan of market-based solutions perhaps we could auction him
> off? Surely the person willing to pay the most for him is the person who
> loves him the most, and what more can a man want than the love of a
> devoted consumer?

Of course! This makes a lot of sense. I'm honored to see that the bidding
war has already started. And that it is an English auction and not a Dutch
one :-)

If one studies love, it seems that it has three main components on the low
neural level: an attraction system finding the best mate and causing a
passionate "clicking together", an attachment system for creating a
lasting pair bond and a lust system for mating with the partner (or
anybody else suitable). At least in some people attraction is influenced
by social status and wealth, so signalling desire through auction might
work. I'm less sure about how one could make a marketbased pair bond,
except of course of the general observation that marriage stability is
affected by the relative utility of staying together vs apart. Market
based lust is no problem if one is a red-blooded capitalist, just think of
all those lovely stock options!

(for those of you who can read Swedish, you might want to see Waldemar's
hillarious Ayn Rand porn parody
http://www.eudoxa.se/techne/archives/lem.pdf
"He put on the protection of vulcanized rubber that only a rational
capitalist society could mass produce so that men and women would be able
to give each other pleasure without the fear that is the fuel for the
infernal construction of guilt that the mystics had created and fed with
their hateful jabbering")

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University