Do you stop enjoying sex when you use birth control?
I stop enjoying sex when the other person isn’t really aroused. The mechanisms for detecting affect evolved before language and abstract cognition. There is good reason to believe that it takes a whole lot of effort to alter or falsify them. These mechanisms are tools, we are stuck with them, so it behooves us to use them optimally. I think trying to like someone is suboptimal.
Someone trying to like me is like a rapid-onset smile. Someone who simply likes me is like a slow-onset smile.
Instead of trying to like things because it’s instrumentally useful, I think it’s far better to strive for optimal instrumentality from one’s liking.
The former would be like learning about a genre of music because it’s popular. The latter is like delving into a genre of music because one finds it moving. Great things come out of the latter. Mediocrity comes out of the former.
(Underlying this debate is the erroneous notion of the “blank slate.” Our emotions are not a blank slate. They are a finely tuned processing and guidance mechanism, just not tuned for our present circumstances.)
I stop enjoying sex when the other person isn’t really aroused. The mechanisms for detecting affect evolved before language and abstract cognition. There is good reason to believe that it takes a whole lot of effort to alter or falsify them. These mechanisms are tools, we are stuck with them, so it behooves us to use them optimally. I think trying to like someone is suboptimal.
Someone trying to like me is like a rapid-onset smile. Someone who simply likes me is like a slow-onset smile.
Instead of trying to like things because it’s instrumentally useful, I think it’s far better to strive for optimal instrumentality from one’s liking.
The former would be like learning about a genre of music because it’s popular. The latter is like delving into a genre of music because one finds it moving. Great things come out of the latter. Mediocrity comes out of the former.
(Underlying this debate is the erroneous notion of the “blank slate.” Our emotions are not a blank slate. They are a finely tuned processing and guidance mechanism, just not tuned for our present circumstances.)
Ideally wouldn’t this be a loop, rather than either/or?