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Lest anyone reading this journal of a primitive man should think we spend our time mired in abstractions, let me also say that I am discovering the richness available to those who are willing to alter their major characteristics. The variety of emotions available to a reconfigured human mind, thinking thoughts impossible to its ancestors...
The emotion of -*-, describable only as something between sexual love and the joy of intellection — making love to a thought? Or &&, the true reverse of pain, not "pleasure" but a "warning" of healing, growth and change. Or (^+^), the most complex emotion yet discovered, felt by those who consciously endure the change between mind configurations, and experience the broad spectrum of possibilities inherent in thinking and being.
— Greg Bear, Eon
So... I'm basically on board with that sort of thing as a fine and desirable future. But I think that the difficulty and danger of fiddling with emotions is oft-underestimated. Not necessarily underestimated by Greg Bear, per se; the above journal entry is from a character who was receiving superintelligent help.
But I still remember one time on the Extropians mailing list when someone talked about creating a female yet "otherwise identical" copy of himself. Something about that just fell on my camel's back as the last straw. I'm sorry, but there are some things that are much more complicated to actually do than to rattle off as short English phrases, and "changing sex" has to rank very high on that list. Even if you're omnipotent so far as raw ability goes, it's not like people have a binary attribute reading "M" or "F" that can be flipped as a primitive action.
Changing sex makes a good, vivid example of the sort of difficulties you might run into when messing with emotional architecture, so I'll use it as my archetype:
Let's suppose that we're talking about an M2F transformation. (F2M should be a straightforward transform of this discussion; I do want to be specific rather than talking in vague generalities, but I don't want to parallelize every sentence.) (Oddly enough, every time I can recall hearing someone say "I want to know what it's like to be the opposite sex", the speaker has been male. I don't know if that's a genuine gender difference in wishes, or just a selection effect in which spoken wishes reach my ears.)
Want to spend a week wearing a female body? Even at this very shallow level, we're dealing with drastic remappings of at least some segments of the sensorimotor cortex and cerebellum — the somatic map, the motor map, the motor reflexes, and the motor skills. As a male, you know how to operate a male body, but not a female one. If you're a master martial artist as a male, you won't be a master martial artist as a female (or vice versa, of course) unless you either spend another year practicing, or some AI subtly tweaks your skills to be what they would have been in a female body — think of how odd that experience would be.
Already we're talking about some pretty significant neurological changes. Strong enough to disrupt personal identity, if taken in one shot? That's a difficult question to answer, especially since I don't know what experiment to perform to test any hypotheses. On one hand, billions of neurons in my visual cortex undergo massive changes of activation every time my eyes squeeze shut when I sneeze — the raw number of flipped bits is not the key thing in personal identity.
The emotion of -*-, describable only as something between sexual love and the joy of intellection — making love to a thought? Or &&, the true reverse of pain, not "pleasure" but a "warning" of healing, growth and change. Or (^+^), the most complex emotion yet discovered, felt by those who consciously endure the change between mind configurations, and experience the broad spectrum of possibilities inherent in thinking and being.
— Greg Bear, Eon
So... I'm basically on board with that sort of thing as a fine and desirable future. But I think that the difficulty and danger of fiddling with emotions is oft-underestimated. Not necessarily underestimated by Greg Bear, per se; the above journal entry is from a character who was receiving superintelligent help.
But I still remember one time on the Extropians mailing list when someone talked about creating a female yet "otherwise identical" copy of himself. Something about that just fell on my camel's back as the last straw. I'm sorry, but there are some things that are much more complicated to actually do than to rattle off as short English phrases, and "changing sex" has to rank very high on that list. Even if you're omnipotent so far as raw ability goes, it's not like people have a binary attribute reading "M" or "F" that can be flipped as a primitive action.
Changing sex makes a good, vivid example of the sort of difficulties you might run into when messing with emotional architecture, so I'll use it as my archetype:
Let's suppose that we're talking about an M2F transformation. (F2M should be a straightforward transform of this discussion; I do want to be specific rather than talking in vague generalities, but I don't want to parallelize every sentence.) (Oddly enough, every time I can recall hearing someone say "I want to know what it's like to be the opposite sex", the speaker has been male. I don't know if that's a genuine gender difference in wishes, or just a selection effect in which spoken wishes reach my ears.)
Want to spend a week wearing a female body? Even at this very shallow level, we're dealing with drastic remappings of at least some segments of the sensorimotor cortex and cerebellum — the somatic map, the motor map, the motor reflexes, and the motor skills. As a male, you know how to operate a male body, but not a female one. If you're a master martial artist as a male, you won't be a master martial artist as a female (or vice versa, of course) unless you either spend another year practicing, or some AI subtly tweaks your skills to be what they would have been in a female body — think of how odd that experience would be.
Already we're talking about some pretty significant neurological changes. Strong enough to disrupt personal identity, if taken in one shot? That's a difficult question to answer, especially since I don't know what experiment to perform to test any hypotheses. On one hand, billions of neurons in my visual cortex undergo massive changes of activation every time my eyes squeeze shut when I sneeze — the raw number of flipped bits is not the key thing in personal identity.
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