Seasons

Bev:

I realize that you were only speaking of your weight as an example, but: as I understand it, there is some evidence that exercise and dieting have a limited ability to alter weight, that your inner regulatory system has a certain target.

And more generally, sometimes it is remarkably hard to change something very simple. I have a tendency to mutter. At times I have been very embarrassed by this and tried very hard to break what I thought of as a habit. But I found that the best I could do was to modify it a little bit. I probably have a couple of Tourette's genes.

Some people have this notion of "free will" which says that we are in total control. Sartre was an extreme example of this. But the truth is, we are not nearly so flexible as we think.

People often say, "When I was a child, I used to hate it when my parent behaved xyz. But now, with my kids, I find myself behaving xyz!"

P.S.: I'm sure you are quite beautiful regardless of your weight. 15 extra pounds is not going to be hazardous to your health, unless you are 3 feet tall.

As you are well aware, we live in a society with exaggerated ideals of feminine slimness.

It's none of my business, but you might ask yourself whether you are rounder than the women in Rubens' "the Three Graces."

Is the thing that is hard to change your weight, or your tendency to worry about your weight?

But we will be one day soon, I'm sure of that. And the technology's coming whether we're ready or not - it's going to be one hell of a roller coaster ride!

Well, this worries me: people observe that technology grows exponentially or more than exponentially, and they project that it will continue to do so. But I think there comes a point where individuals and society just can't keep up with such change. We will either have to limit this change or suffer a collapse.

Irina,

Thanks for your encouragement. My weight was an example, but not a major problem. Since it made you ask I'll explain.

It's not a health risk. My metabolism slowed down in my mid 30's and I went up to 130 (which is still not dangerous). I am now 40 and have managed to reset at 115, but I am only 5'2" and very small boned and on me it all hangs on the tummy. Rubens would have no problem with it.

The numbers are misleading if you don;t actually see how I look. I live in an age where women's fashion involves a flat stomach. I should be 100. When I try to buy clothes the legs are alway too long if I get something that fits my waist, and in a dress the chest is always too big if the waist fits. No one likes an apple shaped short chick.

There are women twice my size who carry it well and look great. Not me. I can live with my faults, but if I were to gain weight in my chest or evenly throughout my body instead of having all 15 extra pounds in an little pillow making me look pregnant, that would be nice too.

Still, it could be worse. I could be Hitler. I do believe I've Godwined my own self.

See how quickly higher philosophical discussion can degenerate into bitching about my body? The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak, and a little flabby. Good thing there are lots of women here.

I like apple shaped short women! Also pear shaped, etc..

And I'm sure that lots of people like you. They may not be panting to get you into bed, but they don't dislike you!

In fact, with heteromales, it's best not to be too 'attractive', because then many of them won't think of you any other way...

"Godwined"?

Thanks Irina. Not truly a big issue. Just hungry tonight. I ate a bag of peanuts and M & Ms. Not good for my body, but I feel much better now.

I should probably have said, "no clothing designers like short apple shaped women, or if they do, they won't let their clothes show it." As for men, some like, some don't (but not being disliked wouldn't be much comfort in an unrequited situation). Meh. It's not really about men. It's about how I want to look and feel. And clothes. It's about the clothes. Shallow? Yes. So?

"Godwined" is an informal debate expression coming from Godwin's law. It's a kind of desperate ad homenim move where you compare your opponent to Hitler to try to discredit his or her argument. I guess the more modern version would be to compare your opponent to a terrorist and imply they hate America.

No one likes an apple shaped short chick

Plenty of men do. We're nowhere near as obsessed with women's figures as women are IME. Or maybe that's just the men like me who don't much care about our own figures either? *pats ample belly and thinks about getting a nice sugary snack to keep me going until lunch*

I'm afraid that if he had a fizziplexer he would be sure that it was malfunctioning - besides, he really believes all these things.

Then I'm sure it would stay green. An unconscious self-deception is surely very different from a conscious lie - the MRI models I've seen are nowhere near refined enough to find subtleties of that sort yet (and maybe never will,) but only explicit contradictions between what is verbalized and what is simultaneously thought to be true.

I wonder whether politicians and the like don't really believe those things. The human ability to rationalize is awesome.

They do believe some of it, I'm sure. But then they shore up an uncertainty into a certainty by lying about so many other things. I'm sure Bush & Blair (or their advisors,) genuinely believed there was a chance Iraq had some WMDs. But they lied about how complete the intelligence was, that Saddam was actively aiding Al Quaeda, that the weapons could be deployed against us in 45 minutes, and so much else. They couldn't have made a viable case for war without blatant lying. It was so blatant that the majority of the population here didn't believe it all at the time, but without fizzyplexers you can't prove it.

Well, this worries me: people observe that technology grows exponentially or more than exponentially, and they project that it will continue to do so. But I think there comes a point where individuals and society just can't keep up with such change. We will either have to limit this change or suffer a collapse.

Or change our basic natures, if only by migrating our minds to a neural substrate that can operate much faster than meatware. Then subjective time (aevum) becomes a very different thing from objective clock time (tempus), and gives us a massive amount of slack to accommodate further temporal exponentiation.
If we can't migrate our minds (I accept that it might not be practical, though I hope it will be,) we can at least build other, faster AI minds to pass the baton to.
We've already started doing this changing. Human genetic engineering is well underway, as are the first neural interfaces and augmentation - we can repair senses that don't work. That have never worked in an individual, even. That's pretty fundamental patching of not just the brain, but the mind itself when you think about it.

And if you represent the exponential curve as a measurement of the peak complexity of localised systems in the universe, the curve is not merely technological, or even human - it goes all the way back to the Big Bang (another Singularity we can't accurately model,) asymptotic to the other axis.

Psimagus 4277:

Well, you're right - there was plenty of conscious lying. And the 2nd Downing Street memo leak shows they knew pretty well there weren't any WMD's.

Psimagus 4278-9:

But such migration, or handing over power to AIs, or creation of cyborgs, would itself be a rather remarkable and disorienting technological change. Also, I have a feeling that it would "benefit" (if that is the word) a rather small group of people, the wealthy and the technically advanced. The inhabitants of villages in Bangla Desh being swamped by rising sea level due to global warming are not going to be downloaded into quantum computers by UNESCO by 2050.