This image recently showed up on Flickr (original is nicer):
With the caption:
"Alas for those who turn their eyes from zebras and dream of dragons! If we cannot learn to take joy in the merely real, our lives shall be empty indeed." —Eliezer S. Yudkowsky.
"Awww!", I said, and called over my girlfriend over to look.
"Awww!", she said, and then looked at me, and said, "I think you need to take your own advice!"
Me: "But I'm looking at the zebra!"
Her: "On a computer!"
Me: (Turns away, hides face.)
Her: "Have you ever even seen a zebra in real life?"
Me: "Yes! Yes, I have! My parents took me to Lincoln Park Zoo! ...man, I hated that place."
Part of the Joy in the Merely Real subsequence of Reductionism
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Awful, perhaps, but are these arguments true?
Are you willing to take the risk that you're going to have to admit on your death bed: If only I hadn't succumbed to the dictates of my genes... If only I hadn't lived like the majority; if only I hadn't done what had been done so many times before by so many billions of organisms... If only I had been different enough. But I wasn't. I let my genes pilfer my time for simple, two-dimensional pleasure signals. I placed greater value on companionship than progress. I exchanged the now, for the eternity. I could have saved the world... but now I lay here dying, instead of living forever.
After the Singularity, there's plenty of time for girlfriends. And boyfriends. And robofriends. Trillions of them. You can super-saturate your re-designed gender-specific feedback modules again and again.
But not now. Lead the way. Go wirehead later. Delay gratification. Be a transhuman. Ditch the...