Posted 11 May 2010 - 08:58 PM
Well, I am glad to say that I have finally found the time to answer Jenny's question.For those who are interested... Here goes:
If you were able to exchange your fifty-plus body for the body of an eighteen yearold, would you do it? And if you, then, were given the choice of romantic encounter with an actual eighteen yearold, or with another rejuvinated individual such as yourself, which would you choose?
I believe these questions lead us right to the heart of the challenges now posed by the future of humanity. The first, reflects our age old fascination with the idea of Eternal Youth. But the second, hints at how our thinking has now evolved beyond the familiar fables we have repeated to ourselves for so long.
Many times, back to the beginning of recorded culture, we have seen speculative tales of eternal youth in which the ultimate and inescapable consequence is an eventual weariness with life, such that the only remaining desire is that of release into death. In this scenario, all pleasures become dull when their novelty is gone.
But there is a fundamental flaw in this pretention: Yes we do become weary of sameness (and even exquisitely beautiful sameness) too oft repeated . However, for this to be an inescapable law, we must assume that the same experience, as in eating, or music, or lovemaking, shall remain subjectively the same each time we accomplish them. But, this is not true, because, as WE change, so the EXPERIENCE changes, even though the acts may remain essentially the same. In other words, our own developement, evolution, maturation, ensures that our subjective experience of the same acts will not remain the same. Moreover, as we DO change, even the ways we accomplish the basic acts of survival and art and love, also change, and so we see that the acts themselves do NOT remain the same, and because the world (for human purposes) is composed of all of these actions, it should become clear that as long as WE are evolving, the world of human society itself, in which we live, will also be changing, and there will therefore be no monotonous sameness of which we could become weary.
However, this point, for many centuries, remained moot, simply because the actual acheivement of prolonged youth, much less the reversal of age, was just not a technical possibility. Make no mistake, huge attention and manpower and ressources of all kinds was poured into the pursuit of Eternal Youth, especially among the most powerful, and this even into the most shameful magical practices of sufferring and sacrifice practiced upon those victims always found so readily to hand in the old order of slave society.
But almost all of this research, if we might give it that name, was concerned with the merely asethetic, the cosmetic, in a word the superficial mockery of the true beauty of youth. And from this understanding, another sort of fable arose, concerning the ill effects, not of reversing age, but of indefinitely maintaining it. In this vein, we read of the despair of the old, even surounded by the willing slaves of pleasure, because, no matter what they eat, they have no palate to taste, and no matter what celestial music they listen to, they have not the sharp ears of youth with which to capture its beauty, and of course, in love, no matter what intimacies are attempted, the ability to bring them to conclusion is lacking, or, if that ability be present, once again, the jaded senses of old age would prevent us from enjoying the acts as we would like. And all of this, once again, leads back to a feeling of indifference and even disgust, with all of the good things that life has to offer.
And if we were alive a hundred, or a thousand years ago, these fables, admirably suited, as they are, to soften the touch of death, by reassuring us that longer life is perhaps less than desirable, would have satisfied and calmed our idle interest in what was an evidently impossible desire at the outset.
However, today, the situation has radically changed. We have seen, in the last generations, a REAL extension of youthful vigor, and a REAL reversal of many of the worst effects of age. We have --in no particular order-- reading glasses, rational nutrition, medication, hearing aids, electric scooters and viagra, to mention only these. And basic research into the causes of ageing and strategies to defeat them has progressed so far that we must now begin to consider the philosophical ramifications of extended lifespan, not as idle speculation, but as required and pressing forward planning for their inevitable realisation.
And now, returning to original the question, “Would you prefer a real eighteen yearold, or a fifty yearold with the equivalent of an eighteen yearold body?” I would respond that an actual eighteen yearold knows nothing at all about love. All that they possess are those wonderful freebees of evolution, which, however entrancing they are to begin with, DO become dull and old and boring after one has experienced them a number of times. There is, in short, such a thing as Too Many Virgins. But once deliberate invention has taken the reins, there is no such danger. And I would imagine that an intelligent and inventive old slut with a pristine body would indeed be, from a sexual point of view, a truly formidable personage.
If for instance, we were to recognize that a particular person has a talent for lovemaking, in the same way that J.S. Bach evidently had a talent for musical compostition, would we rather benefit from that talent when the person in question was only eighteen? Or after she had another thirty years of experience, that is, at the age of fifty?
(always assuming that the physcial attributes remain the same-- the texture, the sponginess, the liquification, the warmth, but I forget myself...).
I would say, that if the artist, and we can indeed call her that, were to continue evolving as we spoke of earlier, in both her accomplishment of the acts, and of her experience, then at an advanced age, she would clearly be in a completely different league from an actual young maiden, blushing like the rose, and innocent of the touch of man.
After all, which is better, a young man with a little talent on a saxophone? Or the same man in mature age? The fact is, that Bach (and the other giants of composition) wrote their “best stuff” when they were fifty, and the exceptions like Chopin merely invite us to wonder of what masterpieces tuberculosis (or alcohol and drugs) has ao often robbed us.
In any case, returning to the original statement that the future of humanity is tied up in these riddles, I think it is nothing short of a question of survival for any higher species (of which I believe we are an entry-level example. Can we go forward and CREATE our own pleasures and interests, or will we always be the mere puppets of our evolutionary motivations reinforced with sensual treats, designed only as encouragements for us to reproduce the species? IT is in fact the question of emaining stagnant as THIS species, or taking a deliberate hand in inventing any number of future variants based upon our own deliberate love of life.
My own bias is very clear. If I had the ability to recycle myself in a body of my own design, and were that design to deliberately evolve over time in response, not to some mindless biological survival based paradigm, but in response to the only thing that motivates me even now, which is the simple pleasure of conscious experience and its endless variations, then I would naturally gravitate towards companions who were situated at something like my own level, as opposed to those of an inacsessible sophistication, on the one hand, or an insupportable innocence, on the other.
I would choose my friends, including those I go to bed with (even if I had a brand new body), most preferentially from among those at a similar experience level to my own.
Now I know that some will say this post is WAY too long, and a lot of others will not even read it to begin with, but personally I find the human condition fascinating, and this question of Eternal Youth is at once fundamental to our cultural history and extremely relevant to our current social experience. Therefore, I find it worth the time to write, and perhaps, one or two will also find it is worth the time to read.
Best Regards,
Gordon
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or 
but I understand the Calathumpian side of things
