[ExI] Bodies

Lee Corbin lcorbin at rawbw.com
Thu Mar 18 21:29:07 UTC 2010


Max wrote in

http://www.maxmore.com/virtue.htm

    <I would be hard put to name an Extropian who seems to reject
    the body and the senses. The impression that we do may stem
    from all our talk about merging bodies and brains with technology.
    We seek to overcome the limits of the human body. We foresee
    uploading as a possible late stage of this posthuman synthesis,
    i.e., the transfer of personality and consciousness from the
    natural biological brain to a synthetic, non-biological device.>

It was likely harmful to dissent from this view in 1997---
but I don't think it matters now. You can now name at least
one Extropian who'll be very happy to leave his body behind,
*once there is something far better to host him*, supposing
we ever get so lucky as to attain that possibility.

    <As an Extropian, I do not see my goals as having to do with
    rejecting my body or my senses. On the contrary, I value my
    physical being highly. I invest much time in exercising my
    body, in feeding it well, and in ensuring its continued healthy
    and pleasurable functioning.>

That's extremely prudent! One has to take care of oneself
whatever the underlying machinery.

And, of course, those of us who look at bodies as vehicles
can hardly ever be allowed to speak for Extropians en masse.
But by the same token, those who have no intention of ever
running on distributed hardware cannot speak for all of
us either.

   <I enjoy being embodied as I hike up a mountain, make love,
   take a shower, or dance. Far from rejecting my body I, along
   with other Extropians and non-Extropian cyberculture participants,
   seek to enhance and extend my body, my sensations, my physicality.>

So how would you feel about the scenario I've always envisaged:
every prudent person, whatever flavor of real/apparent reality
they enjoyed, would in fact be running on machines buried deep
within the Earth's crust? (Earth local versions of one, of course.)

I liked very much the parts of your essay, reading it again
after all these years, that denigrate mere wireheading and
the relatively mindless fantasy-living (experience machine).

In *principle* your hikes up mountains, lovemaking,
and dancing would be just as before---so far as you could
tell, as you know. Of course, intellectually, one would
realize that there was no mountain, and actually not even
a body, just as today one knows that there are no colors,
only EM radiation of various frequencies.

But who would care? I ought to have many sensors throughout
the Earth, not just allowing me to check against threats,
but to assist my natural curiosity about all the real
hardware employed to make manifest my virtual reality,
as well as to satiate my expanded curiosity concerning
scientific phenomena.

As for colors, well! No reason my emotions cannot be
linked to an incredible variety of new hues.

Won't it be interesting to see yourself the actual code
and chips that produce your very real feelings and thoughts?
Imagine being able to implement into room-sized equipment
those physical circuits that *are* a particular thought
or feeling in real time---and see it operate simultaneously
as you experience it!

I love my fifty trillion cells very much, the way I love
other vehicles I've driven for many years, only much
more so. But the sad day arrives, as it often has,
when one must say goodbye. I've yet never failed to
shed a tear.

If things go well---I'm keeping my fingers crossed---and
I get frozen, then so far as I can see, in all likelihood
that will be goodbye. It's just to be hoped that it's only
goodbye to a loyal vehicle, which was so very good to me
for all those decades, and not goodbye to my experience
and to my life.

Lee



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