Comment on Sensual Experience

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 14:12:05 GMT

Let me be clear about sex.

I don't think our minds were engineered to have fun with a tessarect or a rubik's cube because it is complex. I think the amount of fun we have is proportional to the likelihood that an analogous problem would get us higher up in the status hierarchy in the savannah, say, a problem about how to hunt something.

This is backed up by experiments in which we find it easier and funnier to detect cheaters drinking while underage, as opposed to problems which are exactly as complex, but use only abstract symbols. (Tooby and Cosmides, 19XX)

So the fun triggers in my brain do not care if my sex life is complex, varied, subtle, within a specific human pair. My happiness is proportional (since I am a male) to how many girls, times 1/2 their social status, times 1/2 how much they love me, and so on and so forth.

Thus I'm prone to believe that fun space is, to a great extend, independent of complexity space, which is awesome news, because it would take less bits to have the same amount of fun.

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