On Thu, Nov 24, 2005 at 08:22:30PM +0530, Vijay Kundaji wrote: > There is undeniably suffering 'out there in the world' - and even where we > have ways in isolation/smaller contexts to 'fix the situation' - it persists.
Man, the dayjob does really make me *suffer* ;) > (hunger, destitution, exploitation, discrimination ...) I guess the question > is > how to best deal with this 'reality' (a transient condition if you are > utopian & > believe in human kind marching linearly towards a perfect world, permanent > fact of life & existence, if you don't) without depressing yourself. So A somewhat radical approach (and doomed for failure in an evolutionary setting) is http://www.hedweb.com/ At a crude level, people are already self-medicating (the stock bubble was attributed to a whole generation's Prozac euphoria, only partly tongue-in-cheek, I think). Of course, this is really really crude, and has side effects, but with personal nanomedicine interventions can ultimatively become arbitrarily smooth and silky. Of course emotions are behaviour drivers, so if you eliminate all negative emotion with nano-soma you'd get something pretty dysfunctional both at personal and society level, from our current point of view, and ultimatevely static. Not quite my cup of poison, I'm afraid. On the other hand, pathology has a bandwidth, so mellowing out negative parts of the spectrum with pharma++ might be worth the risks. Many otherwise-dysfunctionals manage to navigate reality on chemical assist already, crude as it is. > mental/internal techniques to deal with suffering and for self-empowerment in > the situation are probably just fine ... People are wired to crave some universal desiderata (a partnership, peer respect, health, nice environment, being wealthier than the neighbours, etc.) they're unhappy to be without. Lots of it is achievable by personal effort, so changing personal happiness is definitely within the reach of most who would bother with/could spare a sustainable effort. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
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