There are people who really do enjoy woodworking. I can’t picture a utopia where no one ever whittles.
That really expresses something I’ve been mulling over to myself for a while: that failed utopias in fiction, or at least a large class of such, only appear to work because they lack certain types of people. The Culture, ironically, has no transhumanists, people who look at the Minds and say, “I want to be one of those.” Certain agrarian return-to-nature fantasies lack people like me, who couldn’t psychologically survive outside of a city and who derive literally no pleasure from so-called ‘beautiful dioramas’. And of course, any utopia I would try to write probably would fall into the same trap, most likely because I wouldn’t include people who want to whittle.
Good point. It seems like we 1) value an incredibly diverse assortment of things, and 2) value our freedom to fixate on any particular one of those things. So, any future which lacks some option we now have will be lacking. Because at some point we have to choose one future over another, perhaps we will always have a tiny bit of nostalgia. (Assuming that the notion of removing that nostalgia from our minds is also abhorrent.)
I’ll also note that after a bit more contemplation, I’ve shifted my views from what I expressed in the second paragraph of my comment above. It seems plausible that certain classes of problems tickle a certain part of our brain. Visual stimuli excite our visual cortex, so maybe Rubik’s Cubes excite the parts of our brain involved in spatial reasoning. It seems plausible, then, that we could add entire new modules to our minds for solving entire new classes of problems. Perhaps neuroplasticity allows us to already do this to a degree, but it also seems likely that a digital mind would be much less restricted in this regard.
That really expresses something I’ve been mulling over to myself for a while: that failed utopias in fiction, or at least a large class of such, only appear to work because they lack certain types of people. The Culture, ironically, has no transhumanists, people who look at the Minds and say, “I want to be one of those.” Certain agrarian return-to-nature fantasies lack people like me, who couldn’t psychologically survive outside of a city and who derive literally no pleasure from so-called ‘beautiful dioramas’. And of course, any utopia I would try to write probably would fall into the same trap, most likely because I wouldn’t include people who want to whittle.
Good point. It seems like we 1) value an incredibly diverse assortment of things, and 2) value our freedom to fixate on any particular one of those things. So, any future which lacks some option we now have will be lacking. Because at some point we have to choose one future over another, perhaps we will always have a tiny bit of nostalgia. (Assuming that the notion of removing that nostalgia from our minds is also abhorrent.)
I’ll also note that after a bit more contemplation, I’ve shifted my views from what I expressed in the second paragraph of my comment above. It seems plausible that certain classes of problems tickle a certain part of our brain. Visual stimuli excite our visual cortex, so maybe Rubik’s Cubes excite the parts of our brain involved in spatial reasoning. It seems plausible, then, that we could add entire new modules to our minds for solving entire new classes of problems. Perhaps neuroplasticity allows us to already do this to a degree, but it also seems likely that a digital mind would be much less restricted in this regard.