Ask me three questions.

[nemorathwald]

A meme lifted from dawnwolf

Ask me 3 questions, no more no less. Ask me anything you want, and I will answer truthfully and fully. Then I want you to go to your journal, and copy and paste this, allowing your friends (including me) to ask you anything.

Comments

[matt-arnold.livejournal.com]

1. White, with blue tile in the shower. Since I don't pay attention, I had to wait until I was home to find out so I could answer this.

2. Wow, it's so difficult for a transhumanist to answer that question. Naturally-occurring species are all such incredibly sub-optimal "designs" from a biotech point of view. The short story 0wnz0red by Cory Doctorow recently inspired me with the perfect answer if I had to choose one thing: an interface between my autonomic processes and a microcontroller, so I can hack into my biology through a computer and change anything I want. We're able to wiggle our toes at will, but we're locked out of all the important stuff like immunoresponse and metabolism and cognition.
A sanitized metabolism that's hardened to viruses.
Make it no longer true that a human being has to excercise 20 minutes before starting to burn any fat at all.
Triple-jointed.
No longer need to sleep.
But the best things of all would be what could be done to my mind and personhood. Hacking into human nature itself:
"The human emotions as they stand lack an important kind of self-consistency. The human emotional architecture has a fundamental imbalance in it. We are out of kilter. Usually this particular kind of inconsistency would correct itself very rapidly, but in humans it can't, because unlike an Artificial Intelligence, we don't have access to our own source code.
The inconsistency I'm talking about is that we don't want to want what we want. We like eating chocolate, and we don't like eating lettuce. But we wish that we enjoyed lettuce as much as we enjoyed chocolate, because then we'd be thinner. We stay on the treadmill, and we hate that, but we wish we didn't hate it, because then we wouldn't have to expend mental energy. If we had access to our own source code, we could fix the problem. But unfortunately humans were not designed by humans. Humans were designed by evolution. So we eat the cheeseburger, and give up on the exercise plan, and don't read all the books we want to read, and we're never quite as nice as we think we ought to be. It's an unstable condition that can only persist as long as we don't have a choice in the matter. We are not who we would choose to be, if we were free."
The way I see it, your genetic code is not your friend. It created you; but only as its uncaring tool to gain at your expense. Genes express themselves in subtle influences on our desires. We don't always follow our feelings and urges because we're reasoning creatures, but those feelings and urges come from genes. What you need to realize is that your genetic code is completely selfish and would happily ruin your life in order to propagate. Men and women shouldn't be ashamed of how they're influenced by the genetic code trying to hijack their lives. For instance, a man's wanderlust and a woman's damn nesting instinct. It's just inconvenient that what's good for the genetic code is sometimes different from what's good for us, so our choices usually are an uphill fight against feelings, and this frustrates me. That which generates interest and infatuation, or which triggers biological clocks, contradicts what our rational minds would tell us, if we allow our minds to question our animal instinct. If you refuse to question the truth claims of your basic drives, you are royally screwed, because they will contradict each other. Nature has not been good to the human race in this respect. Thanks for creating us, Mother Nature, now would you please stop trying to run our adult lives for your own blind gain? So to answer your question in one sentence: I would take control from Mother Nature.

3. Club Dread, by Broken Lizard, on DVD. This movie sucked.

[sothisislife.livejournal.com]

Matt, I can always count on you to supply a plethora of information that I had no idea I would find as fascinating as I do.

But where are your three questions in MY journal?

=)

[matt-arnold.livejournal.com]

This makes me very happy.