May 2009 – Underlore

Paradise Engineering

This page is in response to…

http://www.hedweb.com/huxley/

Which is possibly imo the most articulate, pressing, relevant, and hope inspiring text ever constructed.

Ironically given some topics covered, I cannot express clearly the subjective value this work has.

I have only one primary complaint, and it is below.

Each paragraph is lifted from the original work located here.

<blockquote>Potentially, transhumans will be endowed with a greater capacity for love, empathy and emotional depth than anything neurochemically accessible today. Our selfish-gene-driven ancestors – in common with the cartoonish brave new worlders – will strike posterity as functional psychopaths by comparison; and posterity will be right.</blockquote>

Just as those like me are considered psychopathic by today’s standards. I’m not crazy, I just see different things and that perception for better or worse has fundamentally altered who I am.

<blockquote>Scare-mongering prophets of doom notwithstanding, a life of unremitting bliss isn’t nearly as bad as it sounds.</blockquote>

Obvious but it needs to be reiterated over and over.

<blockquote>Thus mescaline, and certainly LSD and its congeners, are not fail-safe euphoriants. The possibility of nightmarish bad trips and total emotional Armageddon is latent in the way our brains are constructed under a regime of selfish-DNA.</blockquote>

There’s a lesson pertaining to the drug war in there.

<blockquote>In any case, our descendants are likely to automate menial drudgery out of existence; that’s what robots are for.</blockquote>

This will be the first visible step of humanity away from its infancy. And the first step towards my final solution. They will clean our homes, dig our gardens, and prepare our meals long before they love us and elevate us past suffering.

<blockquote>The impregnable well-being of our transhuman descendants is more likely to promote greater diversity, both personal and societal, not stagnation. This is because greater happiness, and in particular enhanced dopamine function, doesn’t merely extend the depth of one’s motivation to act: the hyper-dopaminergic sense of things to be done. It also broadens the range of stimuli an organism finds rewarding. By expanding the range of potential activities we enjoy, enhanced dopamine function will ensure we will be less likely to get stuck in a depressive rut. This rut leads to the kind of learned helplessness that says nothing will do any good, Nature will take its revenge, and utopias will always go wrong.</blockquote>

Like many of these quotes, this was just reproduced because I liked it.

<blockquote>Unfortunately, the true altruists among our (non-)ancestors got eaten or outbred. Their genes perished with them. </blockquote>

This trend and concept is why I constantly rail against mate selection issues. Not because I myself am generally excluded for whatever reasons, as painful as that is, but because, selection pressure is the fundamental force acting on our species. This is also why my final solution takes the form it does. It is designed expressly to shortcut the system for our collective and individual benefit.

<blockquote>Hopefully, the need for manifestos and ideological propaganda will pass.</blockquote>

And like the honest cancer researcher, I too hope to one day, hopefully in the next 12 hours, be completely out of a job.

<blockquote>The contrast between true and false happiness, however, is itself problematic. Even if the notion is both intelligible and potentially referential, it’s not clear that “natural”, selfish-DNA-sculpted minds offer a more authentic consciousness than precision-engineered euphoria. Highly selective and site-specific designer drugs [and, ultimately, genetic engineering] won’t make things seem weird or alien. On the contrary, they can deliver a greater sense of realism, verisimilitude and emotional depth to raw states of biochemical bliss than today’s parochial conception of Real Life.</blockquote>

Again, just a really valid point I liked.

<blockquote>Post-humans are not going to get drunk and stoned. Their well-being will infuse ideas, modes of introspection, varieties of selfhood, structures of mentalese, and whole new sense modalities that haven’t even been dreamt of today.</blockquote>

Again, just really cool.

<blockquote>Citizens must not fall in love, marry, or have their own kids. This would seduce their allegiance away from the community as a whole by providing a rival focus of affection.</blockquote>

Sadly, while this was meant to be an indictment of the brave new world fictional society, I see it as a reality here today in the real world. Sure we are allowed to love marry and have children but the process at every level is so unimaginably constrained that it might as well be disallowed. The Company tell us effectively in this context “You can have anything you want, so long as you want what we say you should want.”

<blockquote>And above all, when suffering becomes truly optional, we shouldn’t force our toxic legacy wetware on others.</blockquote>

As we do today on both a genetic and memetic level. Our effort to insure that our children are like us is the most cruel thing we can do to them.

<blockquote>Enhancing serotonin function – other things being equal – is likely to leave an individual less likely to submit to authority, not docile and emasculated.</blockquote>

And that is another reason why the pill must be given in food, not merely to pacify the patient, but the patient’s ever watchful but dimwitted jailer.

<blockquote>Animal suffering is just savage, empty and pointless. So we’ll probably scrap it when it becomes easy enough to do so.</blockquote>

In vitro meat. It funny how recently all the things I’ve spoken and written about are becoming realities, or at least far more widely discussed.

<blockquote>Down on the farm, tasty, genetically-engineered ambrosia will replace abused sentience. For paradise-engineering entails global veganism. Utopia cannot be built on top of an ecosystem of pain and fear.</blockquote>

Good point. As the Hero Norma Borlaug put it, “You can’t build a better world on empty stomachs and human misery.”

<blockquote>But as science progressively gives us the power to remould matter and energy to suit our desires – or whims – it would take an extraordinary degree of malice for us to sustain the painfulness of Darwinian life indefinitely. For as our power increases, so does our complicity in its persistence.</blockquote>

Power = Responsibility. If you can help at reasonable cost or below, you have an ethical responsibility to do so. This is related to sex, monogamy, and the term ‘slut’.

<blockquote>Even unregenerate humans don’t tend to be sustainably ill-natured. So when genetically-engineered vat-food tastes as good as dead meat, we may muster enough moral courage to bring the animal holocaust to an end.</blockquote>

Again. Simple win.

<blockquote>Selfishness, whether in the technical or overlapping popular sense, is a spectacularly awful principle on which to base any civilization. Sooner or later, simple means-ends-analysis, if nothing else, will dictate the use of genetic engineering to manufacture constitutionally happy mind/brains.</blockquote>

But that logic will not convince anyone unless they already were in a position to agree as a result of complex nature-nurture interaction and requisite ancestral genetic pressures. Again, the final solution.

<blockquote>But the attributes of power, status and money, for instance, however obviously nice they seem today, aren’t inherently pleasurable. They yield only a derivative kick that can be chemically edited out of existence. </blockquote>

Means to an end. People generally miss this whole idea. A fun game is asking people what they want with this in mind. Ultimately everyone wants to be happy, what they think they want are merely tools they think will get them there. In this context I find it amusing, thinking back on all the answers I’ve ever gotten which related to drugs. Since they were closest to a real answer.

<blockquote>Likewise, intense and unpleasant social anxiety was sometimes adaptive too. So was an involuntary capacity for the torments of sexual jealousy, fear, terror, hunger, thirst and disgust. Our notions of dominance and subordination are embedded within this stew of emotions. </blockquote>

That explains me nicely. I often wondered how someone like me got here, in a purely Darwinian sense.

<blockquote>Sado-masochistic images of domination-and-submission loom large in a lot of our fantasies too. The categories of experience they reflect were of potent significance on the African savannah, where they bore on the ability to get the “best” mates and leave most copies of one’s genes. But they won’t persist for ever.</blockquote>

God willing.

<blockquote>Allegedly “immutable” human nature will change as well when the genetic-rewrite gathers momentum and the reproductive revolution matures. The classical Darwinian Era is drawing to a close.</blockquote>

Again.

<blockquote>Unfortunately, its death agonies may be prolonged. Knee-jerk pessimism and outright cynicism abound among humanistic pundits in the press. They are common in literary academia. And of course any competent doom-monger can glibly extrapolate the trends of the past into the future.</blockquote>

Not if you trick them into thinking it was their idea or they can profit by some element of it. Slippery slope them. Make them think they’re getting away with something.

<blockquote>Yet perhaps asking whether we would appreciate ecstatic art of 500 or 5000 years hence is futile in the first place. We simply can’t know what we’re talking about. For we are unhappy pigs, and our own arts are mood-congruent perversions. </blockquote>

And that’s why I hate the vast majority of art, television, movies, and music because all I see is erotic capitol and antler bashing, and those who profit from it. Our art as it stands now is disgusting and shallow and worthless on the whole. Which is why to me arguments about how great we are based on our art fall on incredulous ears. I mean really, a can of soup, some naked girls, a guy with his eye in the wrong place, a melted clock? And that’s not even starting on the trillions of examples of ‘art’ that boil down to “I desperately want to fuck all hotties and kill all other males.” or “Compete for the privilege of fucking me.” Come on, we can SO do better.

<blockquote>One hopes, on rather limited evidence, that the birth-pangs of the new genetic order will be less traumatic.</blockquote>

If the right people hear and listen to me, it will actually be enjoyable.

<blockquote>Windfalls and spending-sprees do typically bring short-term highs. Yet they don’t subvert the hedonic treadmill of inhibitory feedback mechanisms in the brain. Each of us tends to have a hedonic set-point about which our “well”-being fluctuates.</blockquote>

Again.

<blockquote>The endless cycle of ups and downs – our own private re-enactment of the myth of Sisyphus – is an “adaptation” that helps selfish genes to leave more copies of themselves; in Nature, alas, the restless malcontents genetically out-compete happy lotus-eaters. It’s an adaptation that won’t go away just by messing around with our external environment.</blockquote>

And here is where science needs philosophy and the concept that inspired Einstein’s famous quote about science being lame.

<blockquote>A few centuries hence, we may rapidly take [im]material opulence for granted. And this virtual cornucopia won’t be the prerogative of a tiny elite. Information isn’t like that. Nor will it depend on masses of toiling workers. Information isn’t like that either. If we want it, nanotechnology promises old-fashioned abundance all round, both inside and outside synthetic VR.</blockquote>

Yup.

<blockquote>The experience of this-is-real – like all our waking- or dreaming consciousness – comprises a series of neurochemical events in the CNS like any other. It can be amped-up or toned-down. Reality does not admit of degrees; but our sense of it certainly does. </blockquote>

Yup.

<blockquote>Thus Huxley doesn’t offer a sympathetic exploration of the possibility that prudery and sexual guilt has soured more lives than sex. In a true utopia, the counterparts of John and Lenina will enjoy fantastic love-making, undying mutual admiration, and live together happily ever after.</blockquote>

Yup.

<blockquote>If suffering has been medically eradicated, does happiness have to be justified any more than the colour green or the taste of peppermint? Is there some deep metaphysical sense in which we ought to be weighed down by the momentous gravity of the human predicament? – Only if it will do anyone any good. The evidence is lacking.</blockquote>

Yup.

<blockquote>Moreover this transformation of the living world, and eventually of the whole cosmos, into a heavenly meaning-steeped nirvana will in no way be “unnatural”. It is simply a disguised consequence of the laws of physics playing themselves out. </blockquote>

And the point of the path is revealed.

<blockquote>Until now, selection pressure has ensured we’re cursed with a genome that leaves us mostly as callous brutes, albeit brutes with intermittently honourable intentions.</blockquote>

Again, why I’m always on monogamy’s ass. It’s not just me people.

<blockquote>This isn’t to deny that love is real. But its contemporary wellsprings have been poisoned from the outset. Only the sort of love that helps selfish DNA to leave more copies of itself – which enable it to “maximize its inclusive fitness” – can presently flourish. It is fleeting, inconstant, and shaped by cruelly arbitrary criteria of physical appearance which serve as badges of reproductive potential. If we value it, love should be rescued from the genes that have recruited and perverted the states which mediate its expression in blind pursuit of reproductive success.</blockquote>

Love through the lens of the meat.

<blockquote>When sexual guilt and jealousy – a pervasive disorder of serotonin function – are cured, then bed-hopping will no longer be as morally reckless as it is today.</blockquote>

Again with the term slut, and the profit The Company gets from us fighting each other for sex.

<blockquote>And just as during much of the Twentieth Century, any plea for greater social justice could be successfully damned as Communist, likewise today, any strategy to eradicate suffering is likely to be condemned in similar reactionary terms: either wirehead hedonism or revamped Brave New World. This response is not just facile and simplistic. If it gains currency, the result is morally catastrophic.</blockquote>

Again, final solution.

<blockquote>But one does one’s best. The ideological obstacles to genetically pre-programmed mental super-health are actually more daunting than the technical challenges. </blockquote>

Hence my life’s work.

Hence my approach, which may be self defeating as I’m about to explain it, but honor demands that i do so. I’ve always said that if you can’t trick a child into doing what you want you shouldn’t breed, this is an indictment of brutality and dominance through fear. The relevant point here is that humanity must be tricked into this, it must be delivered in candy as surly as one must hide medicine in the dogs food. We will never eat this as it is, as we are. The hedonic engineered populace may be swayed by logic and clarity but normal humans simply are not. They are too thoroughly owned by their dopamine addiction, and social masters.

It has been suggested quite astonishingly well that the solution is to edit the species in such a manner as to preserve our humanity and eliminate suffering as an option.

Some may see my solution and dismiss it out of hand as a result seeing the direct edit preferable. I am aware of this argument.

Which is more likely to be accepted by a given individual. A syringe of retrovirus which will forever make them happy and different? Or a delicious little slave thing that adores the very idea of their pleasure and makes its life goal the enhancement of it’s host’s enjoyment and general well being?

The end goals of genetic hedonism and my symbiotic slave species solution are one in the same. I’m simply suggesting a different more palatable way of getting there. Creation of this servant race of neo humans who actually enjoy helping will lead to interbreeding, and eventually the traits of suffering et all, will be quietly annihilated. Our species as it is will NEVER accept the hedonic genetic option no matter how technically feasible or desirable logically it may be. Only the most bold and fringe among us will attempt it, others will murder to the point of self annihilation.

One fact is always overlooked by the writers of these essays, a fact I’ve personally discovered again and again, and hopefully learned from. Logic does not dictate emotion. In order to affect change, one must use emotion creatively and responsibly.

So my final solution stands.

Oppositional Defiant Disorder is a Crock

So I was watching Criminal Minds, pretty sweet show, and there was an off hand reference to Oppositional Defiant Disorder, and I noted it mentally as an error as I do with TV shows and media if I am aware of them, and as I am in the habit of checking up on the things I believe, I Wikied this ‘ODD’ expecting to find an elaboration on its false roots, when to my shock and amazement, I discovered that it’s real.

From the Wiki..,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppositional_defiant_disorder

Diagnostic Criteria

1. A pattern of negativistic, hostile, and defiant behavior lasting at least 6 months, during which four (or more) of the following are present:

Note: Consider a criterion met only if the behavior occurs more frequently than is typically observed in individuals of comparable age and developmental level.
1. often loses temper
2. often argues with adults
3. often actively defies or refuses to comply with adults’ requests or rules
4. often deliberately annoys people
5. often blames others for his or her mistakes or misbehavior
6. is often touchy or easily annoyed by others
7. is often angry and resentful
8. is often spiteful or vindictive

2. The disturbance in behavior causes clinically significant impairment in social, academic, or occupational functioning.

3. The behaviors do not occur exclusively during the course of a Psychotic or Mood disorder.

4. Criteria are not met for Conduct Disorder, and, if the individual is age 18 years or older, criteria are not met for Antisocial personality disorder.

So there is a mental illness, ironically called odd, that makes you defiant.

Let me just sum up how I feel about that real quick and then I’ll go into how I came to this conclusion.

This is absolutely odious. As in, worthy of hate and disgust. I have trouble articulating the seething rage I feel at the very idea of this “condition” existing.

Never has it been so clear that the psychological community is being turned to unethical purpose by those who wish above all else to remain in power.

First lets look at the definitions.

The first question one would have is “How is this a disease again?” I mean if opposing things, and defying things, makes one crazy… well then I’m pretty sure we all are.

Their solution?

Consider a criterion met only if the behavior occurs more frequently than is typically observed in individuals of comparable age and developmental level.

So, if they are defiant to a normal degree, then it isn’t ODD. Heh.

This is my first problem. The word normal means acceptable. Acceptable defiance is a contradiction in terms. If the behavior is accepted then it is not defiant. The whole point of defiance is doing the unacceptable.

They must be talking about false defiance, like the cliché goth kid image, hanging up Manson posters but still showing up to choir practice. Buying a pair of pants covered in safety pins from hot topic with your allowance, is not defiance, yet for the purposes of this diagnostic, it would be considered “normal” defiance. The type of behavior that is normally called a “phase.”

Since this type of thing strongly reminds of pseudoscience used to halt social evolution, I’m going to shape my analogy based on race. In honor of all those dimwit doctors who tried to tell us that blacks were measurably and objectively inferior.

I’m going to show how a typical black child growing up under civil oppression would have squarely qualified for this disorder.

Let’s begin.

I’m going to write in defense, and from the perspective of, this child. His name is Malcolm, for obvious reasons.

1. A pattern of negativistic, hostile, and defiant behavior lasting at least 6 months, during which four (or more) of the following are present:

Yes I have a negative attitude, I’m tired of being told by word and deed that I am somehow a lesser organism by virtue of my birth. Yes I’m hostile, hostility towards oppression is not only natural but a hallowed aspect of our national identity. The English didn’t leave politely. Yes I’m defiant, I feel it is my ethical duty to reject social constraints that are clearly oppressive. These behaviors and attitudes will persist so long as the situation calls for them.

Consider a criterion met only if the behavior occurs more frequently than is typically observed in individuals of comparable age and developmental level.

Well the other kids have meekly accepted their secondary roles having folded under various forms of oppressive mechanisms ranging from shaming and despair to physical assault. But for some reason, I was born a fighter, and the fear of punishment and pain will not dissuade me.

1. often loses temper

I’m a child, not a sociologist or a psychologist or an economist, or an historian. I don’t have the context or the raw data needed to understand why I’m being treated like an animal. The historical and racial dynamics escape me for the time being, and when faced with the absurd and exploitive bigotry around me I as a result of my inability to understand am often frustrated past the point of quiet endurance.

I routinely end up yelling at bus drivers and police and store clerks and managers and anyone else in a position to enforce these bogus social restrictions, and who profit from the same.

2. often argues with adults

Well of course I argue with them, they say absurd and insulting things. They then use their position in lieu of evidence or debate, telling me to be quiet and sit down or this is not the time or place, and when I explain that this is unacceptable as a rebuttal, I am sanctioned.

3. often actively defies or refuses to comply with adults’ requests or rules

The water fountain I am expected to use is neglected, and were it in perfect working order I would still refuse to use it on principal. Nor do I feel like walking all the way to the back of the bus when there are so many empty seats readily available near the front. I will not obey a rule that is pointlessly inefficient or unethical.

4. often deliberately annoys people

I won’t deny a certain amount of satisfaction in bringing some of the frustration I feel to those around me. I do not consider this any more pathological than a police officer taking pleasure in arresting a child abuser, and as a result preferring to work on cases where child abuse is at issue.

Seeking to annoy can be quite natural.

Sometimes annoying an enemy even provides a tactical advantage. By forcing them to show their true nature. An excellent example of this is sit-ins, work stoppages, and other forms of non violent protest.

5. often blames others for his or her mistakes or misbehavior

Considering that my ‘mistakes’ and ‘misbehaviors’ include actions explained above, and as I said before I will continue these behaviors so long as the situations that call for them persist, I cannot help but blame others for creating or bolstering those situations and conditions.

For example, if I consistently am placed in detention by the principal for breaking his water fountain segregation rules, am I truly to blame?

6. is often touchy or easily annoyed by others

Slurs and racist implications have a profound effect on me, and it is very easy to work a slur into a sentence. Since the society around me takes it as a given that I should be content with my lot, I often appear touchy or easily offended. Why don’t I just go sit at the back of the bus? Because I shouldn’t have to.

7. is often angry and resentful

I do resent being treated like a second class citizen for no good reason, I am angry about that treatment and I think rightfully so.

8. is often spiteful or vindictive

Sometimes examples must be made. Sometimes a single person can typify a given behavior or position. Sometimes the unethical behavior pushes a person past the limits of equitable response, but in the end how does one determine what is equitable?

2. The disturbance in behavior causes clinically significant impairment in social, academic, or occupational functioning.

My refusal to accept my socially imposed niche has gotten me suspended from school time and again and I expect it to interfere with employment or socializing being that all three demand acceptance of rules which I feel are unjust.

3. The behaviors do not occur exclusively during the course of a Psychotic or Mood disorder.

I don’t have fits, and while I may have good days and bad days, I’m upset about racism all day, because racism exists, all day.

4. Criteria are not met for Conduct Disorder, and, if the individual is age 18 years or older, criteria are not met for Antisocial personality disorder.

No, I have a conscience. I don’t throw kittens into rivers or the like. In fact if they would just treat me like an equal citizen I’m sure I would be quite successful and well liked.

End of analogy.

You see my point?

This Bullshit “condition” can be used to drug or incarcerate budding civil rights leaders, and that’s its primary purpose. To weed out the free thinkers, ASAP.

Going against society is not a mental condition when society is wrong. And society never admits to being wrong until after it has been corrected.

I grow VERY weary of the ageist assumption that children are ALWAYS wrong. Or that they must wait until later to speak up, or demand rights.

Respect does not mean obedience.

Adults often ask unethical or outright stupid things of children.

This analogy can be extended to virtually any instance of a child responding quite naturally to an absurd setting. Imagine an atheist child in a religious home and private school, or vice versa. Debate and rebellion are required for a society to avoid death by stagnation.

Imagine how you would react if you were told that you needed to keep silent and do as you are told until you are ten years older. Imagine if the only reasoning given for this boiled down to or was explicitly, “because I’m ten years older.”

Imagine how the world would look if every 30 year old was required to obey every 50 year old on pain of medication and incarceration.

Society as a whole and our country in particular has evolved by leaps and bounds because of the rebelliousness of our children. Rebellion is the very soul of our country and to put a ceiling on it and to try and drug it or “cure” it is simply reprehensible.

Treating our children like property, pets, employees, and now psychotics, shames us all.

In short, maybe it’s not a disease, maybe the kid just has a point.

Reputable ethical psychologists would do well to voice their opinion on this subject, as should sociologists.

“The first principal of nonviolent action is that of noncooperation with everything humiliating.”

Cesar Chavez

No Worries

“Thou living ray of intellectual fire.”

~William Falconer

Humanity is self serving. That’s not a cynical statement if you explore what that self is. Think of it like a samurai, or a handgun. Service depends on the leadership, the intent.

We all agree that survival and pleasure are good. There are a whole host of things we all agree on, stemming from that simple foundation. Further there are many actions one can take that are in service to the self directly and others (self indirectly.)

But the key is as I said, understanding that self. I don’t mean understanding as in neurology, or psychology, or even sociology. I mean philosophically, fundamentally, what the self does, what its goals are, and what it knows, thinks, feels, within its own context. We have to have a goal before we can implement it. “I just want to be happy” isn’t good enough. We have to know what happy is, where it comes from, and we need to decide if survival and happiness are enough.

Our goals as they stem from our consciousness (meme), and our nature (genes), are in fundamental conflict.

The complete self is the result of the interaction between the two. Well duh you say, everyone is a body and a mind, yes, but no one carries that forward. We have glimpses of unity, and hints, like in religion and martial arts. (body and spirit)

But I’m not talking about self help smoke and mirrors. I’m talking about solid reality.

From a historical standpoint the gene (our strain) was given a hard choice. Build a mechanism to house intelligence and loose it upon our enemies (starvation, predators, environment, etc.), or face extinction. This was a deal with the devil from its perspective because intelligence is in fundamental opposition to the gene. That is, we see everything about life in terms of what it can do for us, or to us, the individual. The gene’s goals are precisely the opposite. They don’t care about the individual at all. The gene is only selfish as a means to an end, and it is by definition unintelligent, self interest is intrinsic to intelligence. The gene often acts in self interest but this is a coincidence; through selection our set of genes has learned to mimic selfishness by process of elimination and thus intelligence. Actual memetic intelligence was dangerous, because that goal became truly about the individual, rather than a smoke screen for species survival.

Intelligence for its own sake is absurdly capable. Just look around. The gene by contrast wants merely to breed and eat, rinse lather repeat, and anyone with an ounce of math skill can tell you where that’s going. For the gene, happiness is survival, or rather happiness is meaningless. The gene has a brutal purity of purpose which the meme can sometimes lack because as of this moment the meme is a parasite or a symbiont with the gene, they can not be usefully separated, yet. The gene can obviously exist without the meme, but the meme currently can only be housed in structures based on the gene. Our primary advantage is that it is unable to detect and plan for our eventual mastery of it, or escape. Indeed, it cannot care.

The gene’s plan requires discipline from without else it leads only one place. The grave. We are not a staff infection, yet we act like one to a frightening and embarrassing degree. Why? Because it was like having to allow demon possession to cure a nasty case of cancer.

The whole of the human condition can be seen as a war, or dance, with these opposing elements. All our weaknesses, all of them, can be understood in this way, and what can be understood can usually be manipulated.

In order to win, we have to create harmony, and there are a number of possible ways to do this. But they all boil down to the following items or equivalents there of. You will be able to see these factions at war.

1. The gene wins and intelligence is selected out of existence.

2. The meme wins and preserves the gene resulting in extinction.

3. The meme wins and the gene is selected out of existence.

The gene will not preserve the meme unless forced to by the environment. It has no ethics.

The first option results in a planet bound society that grows dimmer and dimmer until humanity is once again well and truly a member of the animal kingdom, at which point we’ll probably be consumed by the insects or the fungi or the microbes, having eventually choked to death as a result of our own environmental manipulations intentional and otherwise.

The second option leads to total war. Plagues have no concept of restraint, ants don’t negotiate, and fanatics do not compromise.

But the third leads to what can loosely be called every human word for happy ending. Take your pick because the reality of it is everything anyone has ever wanted for all time limited only by the laws of physics.

You have to know what to fight. The tyranny of the gene over our mind is the enemy and it is not an enemy we can chant or pray or meditate or medicate away. We have to physically edit it, we have to make it a function of the meme by converting it cleanly and completely into a willful intentioned construct. It does not care, it does not think, therefore we must think and care for it. We must halt erosion, and replace it with sculpture.

Dentists and Tooth Care: Conflict of Interest?

Here we have a group of people handsomely paid to address tooth damage, telling us how to prevent tooth damage.

Problem? I think so judging from the butter churn approach the whole industry takes.

I can think of a few ways we could approach the problem and annihilate tooth pain almost entirely.

I grow weary of dentistry apparently refusing to think and act outside the box. Seriously, dental ‘advances’ to me are anachronistic at best. It’s like seeing a “high tech” wash board.

Here are just a few alternatives off the top of my head.

Now I realize I’m not an expert, and some of these may be invalid at the moment, but to dismiss them out of hand is premature given the potential.

1. A gene therapy or drug that tells the body to shed our teeth and grow a new set.

2. A drug which causes the teeth to fall out, so they can then be replaced.

3. A substance that can be applied at home to fill cavities.

4. A substance that actually rebuilds enamel.

5. Custom tooth replacement. MRI/CAT, CAD, Carve, Swap. (water cutter/prototyper machine to carve the tooth out of titanium, and then color it white, with laser surface manipulation)

6. A locally acting neurotoxin that can kill a given tooth’s nerve without destroying its blood supply. And please don’t tell me what I should or should not want, that’s a separate issue.

7. At home sealants or permanent sealants.

8. Custom plaque feeding symbiotic bacteria.

9. A super toothbrush.

10. A hundred other things I haven’t even thought of.

It’s 2009, and we have custom goats that make spider silk, and the best our dentists can do is needles and drills? We can swap out a person’s face/heart/liver, and defeating cavities is beyond us?

Why has nothing like this been attempted? If it has why did it fail? Money?

Could it be because if they approached the question with the goal of actually answering it once and for all one time preventative measures would destroy a multi billion dollar industry?

My tooth hurts as we speak, and I cannot afford to pay my local sadistic/extortionist.

The fact that teeth even have nerves is just about the most asinine thing about the human body in my opinion, other than the fact that we don’t grow new parts when old ones are removed.

Come on, we make tools capable of literally shredding steel, we can do better.

Edit: The first sense of this post was placed in a forum for student dentists, the reaction was shocking. Here is a link,

http://forums.studentdoctor.net/showthread.php?p=4863519

It also led to a debate challenge, where in two member of the board followed me to harass me further, one of them actually is an adult established employed doctor of dental surgery.

http://www.debate.org/debate/8262/

The debate he has as of this writing failed to accept or decline, is located here.

http://www.debate.org/debate/8288/

He has stated he will not participate.