In praise of the artificial
One
often sees the word "natural" employed as a positive term, evoking
images of pristine sunny meadows and sparkling waterfalls full of
disneyfied animals who are eager to help humans while some cheesy new
age music plays smoothly in the background. The truth, of course, is
the exact opposite: if something is described as "natural", it is an
euphemism for the ugly reality that it sucks. Whenever people have a
choice, they overwhelmingly choose the artificial over the natural,
surrounding themselves with artificial things and processes to better
insulate themselves from the natural things and processes. If you don't
believe me, simply tally the things that you can see from where you are
sitting now and compare how many are natural and how many are
artificial.
The blind and impersonal forces of the nature that shape the natural things are completely indifferent to my happiness. Therefore, anything that these forces create is unlikely to fit my needs and increase my happiness, except perhaps by a sheer lucky coincidence or the fact that my evolutionary tree has forged me to better fit that thing. For any object to fit my needs and increase my happiness, it pretty much has to be artificially engineered to do so. The nature is not going to do this for me for my needs of any higher complexity than breathing air, no matter how hard I wish upon a star that it did.
As technology keeps improving, people get to choose between natural and artificial in many areas where previously only the natural alternative was available. For example, most people already choose to spend their evenings by watching carefully engineered artificial people on TV rather than interact with their natural neighbours. (What do you think will happen when techonology advances so much that these artificial people can fully interact with the viewer?) Similarly, only a small minority of Western people really have natural sex any more. The only people who get to claim that they do are the ones who have ten children by the age of thirty, and the others have wisely chosen to introduce some artificiality to their sex lives. This raises the ire of the traditionalists, as is bound to happen with every technological advance that frees the people from the shackles of nature that some people erroneously worship as being somehow sacred.
Things will get really interesting when the sensory experiences themselves can be encoded to bit sequences and fed directly to the brain, as in the movie "Strange Days". (As a first crude step, this is already being done: any movie, no matter how convincing and emotional, is in reality just a long series of bits, and there is absolutely nothing in principle that prevents these bits from being completely artificially generated instead of using the current semi-artificial technique of recording live actors.) When this finally happens, that's it for everything natural. If you need to do some actual work and spend some real energy to achieve some result that generates a stream of pleasant bit patterns for your sensory input, it is far more economical to generate these bits artificially (or use some prerecorded bits of pleasant situations), since your brain doesn't really care about the difference.
Of course, the ultimate endpoint of this path is the ability to manipulate the brain directly so that even the sensory input is no longer needed. Instead of doing the actual work that results in the stream of pleasant bits entering your senses, or generating these bits artificially for your sensory consumption, you would just directly manipulate your brain to feel the resulting pleasure. This nirvana would probably be the last invention that the mankind would ever make, or even need.
The blind and impersonal forces of the nature that shape the natural things are completely indifferent to my happiness. Therefore, anything that these forces create is unlikely to fit my needs and increase my happiness, except perhaps by a sheer lucky coincidence or the fact that my evolutionary tree has forged me to better fit that thing. For any object to fit my needs and increase my happiness, it pretty much has to be artificially engineered to do so. The nature is not going to do this for me for my needs of any higher complexity than breathing air, no matter how hard I wish upon a star that it did.
As technology keeps improving, people get to choose between natural and artificial in many areas where previously only the natural alternative was available. For example, most people already choose to spend their evenings by watching carefully engineered artificial people on TV rather than interact with their natural neighbours. (What do you think will happen when techonology advances so much that these artificial people can fully interact with the viewer?) Similarly, only a small minority of Western people really have natural sex any more. The only people who get to claim that they do are the ones who have ten children by the age of thirty, and the others have wisely chosen to introduce some artificiality to their sex lives. This raises the ire of the traditionalists, as is bound to happen with every technological advance that frees the people from the shackles of nature that some people erroneously worship as being somehow sacred.
Things will get really interesting when the sensory experiences themselves can be encoded to bit sequences and fed directly to the brain, as in the movie "Strange Days". (As a first crude step, this is already being done: any movie, no matter how convincing and emotional, is in reality just a long series of bits, and there is absolutely nothing in principle that prevents these bits from being completely artificially generated instead of using the current semi-artificial technique of recording live actors.) When this finally happens, that's it for everything natural. If you need to do some actual work and spend some real energy to achieve some result that generates a stream of pleasant bit patterns for your sensory input, it is far more economical to generate these bits artificially (or use some prerecorded bits of pleasant situations), since your brain doesn't really care about the difference.
Of course, the ultimate endpoint of this path is the ability to manipulate the brain directly so that even the sensory input is no longer needed. Instead of doing the actual work that results in the stream of pleasant bits entering your senses, or generating these bits artificially for your sensory consumption, you would just directly manipulate your brain to feel the resulting pleasure. This nirvana would probably be the last invention that the mankind would ever make, or even need.
I managed to persuade Edward O. Wilson, who used to subscribe to a theory that humans want to be in touch with nature, that what humans really want is to be in touch with a new, improved version of nature, as seen in back yard gardens, front lawns, golf courses, college corporate campuses: typically, some kind of parkland that's neither deep forest nor pure openness, but some combination of sunny grassland with some shade trees. A combination of open prospects and secluded refuges being ideal. Add in water, the bigger the better, flowers, and some degree of elevation change, and you've got what humans think of as paradise. Of course, to make a natural-looking paradise, you'll probably need some D5 Caterpillar tractors to first scrape away all existing nature.
Posted by Steve Sailer | 8:31 PM
You said:
"...you would just directly manipulate your brain to feel the resulting pleasure. This nirvana would probably be the last invention that the mankind would ever make, or even need."
People already directly manipulate their brains to feel pleasure by using drugs.
And some types of meditation seem similar to this.
And the cultures that use meditation to achieve nirvana have not had many inventions for a long time.
Posted by Reno | 11:25 PM
I've suspected for some time that this ideal landscape with waterfalls, sunny lawns, and small batches of shadowy forests is how a fertile piece of land looks like when it is intensively grazed by large herbivorous mammals--large relatively defenseless chunks of meat, that is.
Posted by isopossu | 7:43 AM