“sex”
35 posts under this tag.
David Friedman ELZR introduces a fascinating classification of human cooperation in The Machinery of Freedom ELZR. There’s
force (imposing my end on you),
trade (“I’ll help you achieve your end if you help me achieve mine”),
and love (“making my end your end”).
The definition of love alone is, I think, a great achievement. It surely doesn’t include everything we mean by that impossibly burdened word (it doesn’t mention romance, liking or sex) but it does reveal one of love’s most important yet often implicit threads. It is abstract yet the more likely we are to call a love pure, the more likely it is about A caring about B for B’s sake alone.
An interesting exercise came to mind after reading the classification: What human activity/field corresponds to each kind of human cooperation?
The first two kinds are straightforward loosening words up a bit: Politics is the exercise of force. Economics is the exercise of trade. With love, I stumbled for the longest time. I have an answer now.
The exercise of love is… technology. A tool is the purest embodiment of love, of making someone else’s end your end. That’s why technology is so ambiguous, its ends are its users’ ends. Giving you a tool is the ultimate act of love, the more so the more control of it I give you, because by doing that I make my end your end, whatever your end may be—defending your life or stealing. Think of the geeks that cobbled up the internet, ignoring wtf the thing would be used for, coding only so that it would allow for it.
Don’t dismiss this as one geek’s techno-euphoria. There’s something deep in here. Technology is the exercise of love. “If you want to do good, work on the technology, not on getting power.” Nothing less than the meaning of our lives could be here.
Life Results from the Non-Random Survival of Randomly Varying Replicators.
My answer to life, the universe, and everything:
Randomness begets persistence
For among things that vary a lot,
and vary varyingly (= non-independently = causally),
what varies little remains (duh!)
For among things that persist,
what copies itself is an outbreak
Replication begets complexity
For among the ways to copy oneself,
the more successful ones are among the more complex
(for there are many, many more complex ways than simpler ones)
The text below was when I fell in love with China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station. I wasn’t sure for many pages, never one to care much for fantasy. But this, this is what fantasy should be.
Reading the book, as many things else, got interrupted by the exile, but I’ve been possessed downloading ebooks lately and I just found a great HTML version of the book. Let the reading recommence!
Isaac and Lin sat naked on either side of the bare wooden table. Isaac was conscious of their pose, seeing them as a third person might. It would make a beautiful, strange print, he thought. An attic room, dust-motes in the light from the small window, books and paper and paints neatly stacked by cheap wooden furniture. A dark-skinned man, big and nude and detumescing, gripping a knife and fork, unnaturally still, sitting opposite a khepri, her slight woman’s body in shadow, her chitinous head in silhouette.
They ignored their food and stared at each other for a moment. Lin signed at him: Good morning, lover. Then she began to eat, still looking at him.
It was when she ate that Lin was most alien, and their shared meals were a challenge and an affirmation.As he watched her, Isaac felt the familiar trill of emotion: disgust immediately stamped out, pride at the stamping out, guilty desire.
Light glinted in Lin’s compound eyes. Her headlegs quivered. She picked up half a tomato and gripped it with her mandibles. She lowered her hands while her inner mouthparts picked at the food her outer jaw held steady.
Isaac watched the huge iridescent scarab that was his lover’s head devour her breakfast.
He watched her swallow, saw her throat bob where the pale insectile underbelly segued smoothly into her human neck … not that she would have accepted that description. Humans have khepri bodies, legs, hands; and the heads of shaved gibbons, she had once told him.
He smiled and dangled his fried pork in front of him, curled his tongue around it, wiped his greasy fingers on the table. He smiled at her. She undulated her headlegs at him and signed, My monster.
I am a pervert, thought Isaac, and so is she.
Amazing how compelling a dollop of interactivity an underwear catalog makes. (via reddit)
I figured someone had to have done something like this for hardcore porn. Apparently, the Virtual sex with.. series is just that. (Via NYT) Anyone tried it?
Or how about a 360 interactive a la Apple product showcase? Someone has to have done something like that but my google fu fails me. Anyone knows of something like that?
Just that, an emotion. Often sudden, arbitrary, and against our (as opposed to our gene’s) best interest. Not a revelation nor the distillation of reason nor its conclusion—whence this fancy that reason leads somewhere? “Gut feeling” is, you guessed it, nothing but a feeling. Just as we have unique emotions about concrete things—say, lust—, we have unique emotions about abstract ideas and statements—say, certainty. Emotions, concrete or abstract, are enzymes, catalysts: they shortcircuit dillydallying, they trigger action. Ruminating all day without acting makes as little evolutionary sense as ogling all day without fucking. Hence lust, hence certainty.
That, in a nutshell, is On Being Certain’s premise, and though I have but skimmed it in one of my epic B & N skimming marathons, I was certain of its truth the moment I read it.
National unity? The whole point of America is that we’re the country where dissent is welcome. We’re a country of dissidents and fighters and university dropouts and free speech people.
When out of dumb luck I found myself the owner of an advance-reading, not-for-sale copy of Cory Doctorow’s new novel, Little Brother (Amazon, Facebook, Cory’s reading), due to be released this April the 29th, I knew I’d have to gulp it down in one rapt, sleepless night. Cory’s a writer worthy of that, but it was also, well, my first “scoop” ever.
It’s past 6am and I’ve done just that. And before crashing into bed I just want it out that it is Cory’s best novel yet. Science fiction about our present, with our current, unevenly distributed future only slightly jiggled. A novel about America after a terrorist attack bigger than 9/11 and the young hackers who rebel at the idiotic police state that ensues.
It made me feel I belonged to San Francisco, to California, more than ever. It was stomach churning and exhilarating and fun. Yeah, it can be a tad over-educational and preachy at times but just a tad and to its great merit it makes security topics accessible and immensely interesting. The teenage voice of the main characters is a gem (Cory has always shined in dialogue, the more technology mediated the better) and their sexual fumblings are so masterful and eerily accurate (to me, at least) that wistfulness tore me apart. It made me want to hack a new world.
An important book, sure to change many lives.
Believe.
Speaking of dogs, I wonder: if a dog is just about to be ran over by a car and you suddenly save her, would she be aware she almost became roadkill? Would she be shaken afterwards, replaying endlessly in her mind what could have just happened? Would she be grateful? Would she even understand what you just did for her? Could that be as life changing a moment for her as it could be for a person?
More than the past, the present, or the future, our true home as humans is the could. Even more, it is only by reflecting in it the past, the present, and the future that we can see them clearly. A near-death experience—an unhappening in other words—could well be a turning point in our lives, rearranging in one fell swoop our past, present and future. Could matters to us, its phantasmagoria walks among us, and it is or, fittingly, could be, a major component of every single issue that we care about.
Consider abortion
One important problem with it is that even if you don’t consider an early fetus alive or aware, by impeding its growth you’re stumping the future possibility of a very alive and aware being. What are the rights of the inhabitants of could? The ingredients of a cake don’t make a cake until mixed and baked but how can a human not look at flour, eggs, and butter and not see the cake?
Consider sex
Imagine we come up with something to prevent absolutely all STDs and unwanted pregnancies (we ain’t far). Would you still think of sex as something sacred? Would premarital sex or promiscuity still strike you as taboo? Would whores or pedophilia or incest still shock you? Would you consider sex as just one more source of meaning and pleasure, like, say, food? Next time you are shocked by something sexual consider this and realize how much of your shock hinges on pregnancy and STD considerations.
Consider death
What if, as has become increasingly likely the more we learn about biology and our bodies, we could stop it or at least hold it at bay much, much longer? What if we could reverse aging? Doesn’t that possibility merit our consideration? Shouldn’t helping this research or at least knowing about it be one of our top priorities? Who among the death scarred won’t cry could tears if the day comes when it becomes clear that death is not only defeatable but could have been defeated—should have been defeated—decades, centuries ago?
Could matters.
Aristotle famously said that the mark of an educated mind was being able to entertain a thought without accepting it. Personally, I think the mark of an educated mind is to be able to entertain unrealities and see how they matter to reality, to be able to act and think dreams with open eyes.
(It is, by the way, my fascination with could that makes me a fan of science fiction and fantasy—could’s official literatures. Even more than sensawunda I crave sensacould.)
La cultura del terror/4
Fue en un colegio de curas, en Sevilla. Un ninho de nueve anhos, o diez, estaba confesando sus pecados por vez primera. El ninho confeso que habia robado caramelos, o que habia mentido a la mama, o que habia copiado al vecino de pupitre, o quiza confeso que se habia masturbado pensando en la prima. Entonces, desde la oscuridad del confesionario emergio la mano del cura, que blandia una cruz de bronce. El cura obligo al ninho a besar a Jesus crucificado, y mientras le golpeaba la boca con la cruz, le decia:
—Tu lo mataste, tu lo mataste…
Julio Velez era aquel ninho andaluz arrodillado. Han pasado muchos anhos. El nunca pudo arrancarse eso de la memoria.
Eduardo Galeano, El libro de los abrazos
The culture of terror/4
It happened on a school run by priests, in Sevilla. A boy of nine years, or ten, was confessing his sins for the first time. The boy confessed he had stolen caramels, or that he had lied to mother, or that he had copied from the neighboring desk, or maybe he confessed he had masturbated thinking on his girl cousin. Then, from the darkness of the confessional emerged the hand of the priest, brandishing a bronze cross. The priest forced the boy to kiss the crucified Jesus, and while he punched his mouth with the cross, he said:
— You killed him, you killed him…
Julio Velez was that knelt Andalusian boy. Many years have passed. He could never tear that from his memory.
Terry Rodgers paints entrancing glimpses at raw hedonism—modern, American, urban, Grey’s-Anatomy diverse, indolent, excessive, impudent. Set in sumptuous, soap-operatic locales, youth and beauty are squandered in complex orgies of many bodies and many layers. Epicurean pigs, lotus eaters, Klimtian nymphs, frozen in their idle shuffle for our ogling. Though the paintings are in a way surprisingly chaste—nudes showing nothing that the Greeks didn’t sculpt—what both beguiles and offends is that insolent, apathic wallowing in excess—no one ever smiles, this isn’t about happiness, it’s about pleasure. (Via nudonation.)
This just in (via KurzweilAI.net), I can hardly believe it myself:
[..a scientific team] has discovered that sexual orientation in fruit flies is controlled by a previously unknown regulator of synapse strength. Armed with this knowledge, the researchers found they were able to use either genetic manipulation or drugs to turn the flies’ homosexual behavior on and off within hours.
”Homosexual courtship might be sort of an ‘overreaction’ to sexual stimuli,”..
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