Tuesday, June 21, 2005

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.

4 comments:

razorsmile said...

"'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.


Definitely Great minds :D ...

Mac said...

"A vision emerges, one of bio-deterministic falsehood stripped away to reveal the cold machine behind"

Nice.

Mac said...

"pseudo-sciences like behavioral psychology."

I don't think behavioral psychology is a pseudoscience. Of course, that doesn't mean that some behavioral psychologists aren't pseudoscientists.

TheUltimateCyn said...

jeez, am I confused as hell or what?
1) I have total emotional responses to the "O"... I don't give a shit what the survey says!
2) ONE MINUTE? Hardly ever mainly never... maybe the initial shock of it is less than a minute - but riding the wave can be very lengthy; and inasmuch I have great pity for those who have the "substantially less than a minute" thing going on.
3) I don't mind being androidish [I guess I have spent MANY time being one anyway according to the study], so long as I have my groove, you can assume what you like - we know who is really in control.
4) I love controversy over this stuff... Mac is so King.

Go Mac!