Hi!
I read some time ago the book from Kurzweil : The Singularity is Near.
Some points were troubling me during the reading of certain chapters:
According to Kurzweil,in the future we will keep more or less the same type of pleasures, but with only a lot of more possibilities. He gives the example of the sexual pleasure, you can be a man or a woman, according to your wishes, and about eating pleasure, you can eat as often as you want. Because all these pleasures will be separated from their primitive objectives, like reproduction, bringing nutrients etc...
I think the reasoning is wrong, from a biologist point of view.
The pleasure doesn't exist because it' "makes you feel good" (it is a circular reasoning). Only because the advantages to do some things are so strong that natural selection has made this behavior so pleasurable.
And this link is compulsory. So I don't know why sexual intercourse (why that more than rubbing the index of someone?) or eating will give you some pleasure if it has absolutely no interest in terms of biology.
Indeed the sexual drive is only due to testosterone (even women produce that). We know that it's also quite bad for your health (Eunuchs live longer). So I would probably foresee an extinction of sexual drive/sexuality and eating pleasure in the future (and probably replaced by others, more useful for individual or society of these future times).
Edited by Pour_la_Science, 28 November 2011 - 03:29 PM.