Ask YC: do you have a girlfriend/boyfriend?

The last thing you need to know about girls has to do with love. Even just thinking about girls is likely to cause you more emotional anguish than anything else in your life. And it's not like getting mauled by a bear -- that kind of pain goes away after a month or so. No, love, when it goes bad, is worse than pretty much anything. So, why mess with it? Why not just avoid girls altogether? Well, I must admit I've asked myself this many times. And the answer is: can't help it. The emotions and drive are too strong to deny. So, just do the best you can. It is, actually, pretty damn good to have a girlfriend when things are going well. And try to make the best decisions you can, even though your brain isn't really running the show.

>

> You can only play to win if you have some control

> over your life. If you do, then you aren't just what

> you are now.

Yes, for all practical purposes I assume you have much control over your life, not because I'm totally convinced, but because there's no value, for practical matters, in entertaining the alternative.

I didn't mean that we can't change what we are. We definitely have power to make changes in the cultural (and chemical) part of ourselves, which is a big part of what we are. But where does the motivation to do so come from? It ultimately boils down to the same old pulsions.

Now here's a similar, but subtly more puzzling question: imagine some day science enables us to meaningfully overwrite our genetic conditionings so we can control all we feel and desire, from hypothalamus to cortex. Our psyche could become something totally alien to humanity.

Now, what would drive our desire to reflash our EPROM in this way?

I can think of a couple motivations similar to the ones that lead people to experiment with drugs: escapism and curiosity. Or, from a rationalist perspective, we might choose to get rid of inconvenient desires so we could more wholeheartedly pursue whatever ideals have emerged in our consciousness. For example, we might renounce sex and love without regret, and feel, say, the pleasure of acquisition of knowledge with the same intense visceral passion.

So it's plausible that even sane, already happy people see this transformation as desirable.

But this brings an interesting bootstrapping question. What we are doing is changing the "coordinate system" that we use to evaluate the desirability of stuff. According to what "desirability coordinate system" do we compare the old (genetic) one with the new (reflashed) one? Obviously, it has to be according to the old one, since that is what we have at the time the change is considered.

What does it even mean that one value basis favors substituting itself by a different one?? It recalls Nietzschean thoughts: that our minds, societies and cultures are battlefields for the struggle between competing values/ideas/memes, and that our very nature is aiming to become something else.

My initial point was that there was no absolute coordinate system that allowed different coordinate systems to be compared for desirability. I still believe this, but I no longer have such a nihilistic reaction to it.

Back to the point, I think for most people going against the grain of their instincts will be more a cause of suffering (even if it's more evenly distributed through their lifetime) and deathbed regrets than any particular pain endured in the pursuit of love. Therefore, I think pain avoidance is a weak reason to avoid romance.

Then again, I can believe there are people who are genuinely disinterested in romance/sex (Da Vinci and Warhol come to mind). Also, I can understand that some people choose to focus their energy on other things. What I don't believe is that such things are intrinsically more "important". It's just how you choose to redefine your game.

Still, rather than about personality I was talking about basic pulsions, namely those directly related to survival and reproduction.

Contrary to rms, I easily concede that ideas are faster to fill survival needs. But where do those needs come from? Why do we care about surviving, as individuals and as a species? We wouldn't ever have put our minds to work on the problem of survival if the visceral will for survival wasn't already there.

I argued that our genetic conditionings related to sexual selection persist because our genes haven't had time to 'learn' their increasing irrelevance. The slowness of genetic adaptation is an argument in favor, not against, the prevalence of genetic heritage as a factor (certainly not the only one) in our drives and personalities.