From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Wed Apr 03 2002 - 08:05:06 MST
> From: owner-sl4@sysopmind.com [mailto:owner-sl4@sysopmind.com]On Behalf
> Of Carlo Wood
...
> No, I think that humans are "hardwired" to have sex, but only in ONE
> way: having sex gives as a tremendous ammount of pleasure.
It's interesting.... I believe that it feels that way to you, but not to
me, sorry.
I believe that "pleasure" is a natural language term that covers a variety
of different things.
Sure, we can average all these things together to come up with a single
"weighted-average pleasure indicator"...
But in reality the weights in the average shift over time according to
chemical fluctuations in the brain, induced by environmental & social &
emotional factors, etc.
Also we seek pleasure over many different time scales, and this causes a lot
of confusion
What it comes down to is, at times the human urge for sex seems rather
uncorrelated from the human urge for pleasure.... People will seek sex
sometimes, even when greater amounts of pleasure would likely be achieved in
other ways.
Sex is not the only example of this, just a particularly glaring example.
Of course, the highly pleasurable nature of sex is one of the factors that
allows this sort of phenomenon to occur.
The point of all this is: I still think that humans have much more complex
motivational hardwiring than can be simply explained by positing a
"happiness" hardwired goal, with hardwired connections between other
subgoals (e.g. sex) and the happiness goal. The weights of these hardwired
connections vary complexly and contextually, for sure...
-- ben g
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