[ExI] Bodies

[Mike Dougherty]

On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 2:05 AM, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 19 March 2010 15:27, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> wrote:
>> Stathis had written
>>
>>> ...current psychopharmacology is extremely crude. We don't really
>>> know how the drugs work and it's a wonder that they work at all.
>>
>>> There certainly isn't anything you can take that will increase
>>> your interest in a particular activity.
>>
>> My experience, and that of several friends, has been that
>> almost whatever you are doing, seeing, or thinking about
>> becomes more interesting with caffeine. Is this established?
>
> And more so with amphetamines, but it isn't *specific*. You can't make
> yourself more interested in a particular thing that you aren't
> interested in.

So you aren't going to make me interested in accounting by injecting
artificial levels of Accountine(tm)... but with a combination of
proper sugar levels and caffeine and other focus-enhancing
supplements, I would be quite content to spend 6-8 uninterrupted hours
working on program code.  I doubt the general population would feel
the same way.

However, tweaking our motivation deliberately typically coincides with
Uploading fantasies.  I could invest a few dollars in those
supplements and be "wired" either into or out-of my head more|less
than usual - but I don't.  I wonder if that default choice will
continue to limit behavior even after we have access to the brain's
API / control panels.

btw, I said Uploading fantasy not because I doubt it will ever be
possible, but because the kinds of things our currently limited
thinking have conceived to do after the upload are (imo) very small.
It's like those naive beliefs that "heaven" is a place where you can
eat all the ice cream you want without getting fat.  The possibilities
for an uploaded state of being are nearly inconceivable from our
current point of reference.