Posthuman Blues

Orgasms: a real 'turn-off' for women

"'At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings,' says Gert Holstege of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands." (Via NTM!)

So basically, any woman who's experienced sexual ecstasy has spent a small portion of her life as an android. This is highly reminiscent of the brothel in William Gibson's short-story "Burning Chrome," in which prostitutes can wire themselves to computers that render them unconscious and control their movements.

Philip K. Dick foreshadowed Gibson's "meat puppets" with the androids of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" Dick's synthetic humans are effectively indistinguishable from the real thing, but they lack our capacity for empathy. Not to say that humans are necessarily empathic. John Shirley's novel "In Darkness Waiting" explores a hypothetical syndrome he calls "empathy suppression." The book is way-out horror/science fiction, but empathy suppression seems to be both real and pervasive, as witnessed by atrocities such as the Holocaust. Shirley suggests there's a neural mechanism that can switch off a person's usual capacity for empathy -- probably an adaptation for "fight or flight" situations. But sometimes, for whatever reasons, suppression takes hold and empathy never switches back on . . . Empathy suppression syndrome might, in fact, help explain some sexually oriented crimes, such as serial rape.

Dick and Shirley see empathy as a defining human trait. As a proponent of uploading human minds into computers (for purposes ranging from intellectual exploration to space migration), I suggest we elect to keep empathy instead of editing it out of our mentational repertoire -- not because it's "natural" but because it's useful.