For as far as my human eyes can see, I don’t know what kind of mind I should value, if that mind lacks pleasure and happiness and emotion in the everyday events of its life. … If there’s some better way of being (not just doing) that stands somewhere outside this, I have not yet understood it well enough to prefer it.
There are some pleasures I would already readily give up, even lacking the perspective of a transhuman, like the pleasures of the taste/smell of food and being full, in preference for a more sensible system of acquiring energy and nutrients. This seems to be an instance of me standing outside my own system and seeing a shortcoming—a part of my emotional system that is thoroughly archaic and counterproductive, despite the real pleasure it brings—leading to a real preference to change what I find pleasurable. I imagine other humans will prefer to keep these emotions (as is their choice), but they will probably outgrow them as they mature as transhumans, just as I will likely outgrow many more of mine.
For as far as my human eyes can see, I don’t know what kind of mind I should value, if that mind lacks pleasure and happiness and emotion in the everyday events of its life. … If there’s some better way of being (not just doing) that stands somewhere outside this, I have not yet understood it well enough to prefer it.
There are some pleasures I would already readily give up, even lacking the perspective of a transhuman, like the pleasures of the taste/smell of food and being full, in preference for a more sensible system of acquiring energy and nutrients. This seems to be an instance of me standing outside my own system and seeing a shortcoming—a part of my emotional system that is thoroughly archaic and counterproductive, despite the real pleasure it brings—leading to a real preference to change what I find pleasurable. I imagine other humans will prefer to keep these emotions (as is their choice), but they will probably outgrow them as they mature as transhumans, just as I will likely outgrow many more of mine.