= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
insufferablejake comments on Sensual Experience - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (84)
I'm wondering if you don't necessarily need to modify the human brain in order to make this problem at least a bit better. There are already some jobs that are much closer to "savanna" than "office." I chose to go into nursing because, among other things, I knew about my father's experience working in a cubicle and I never wanted that. Nursing is both intellectually stimulating (very much so in critical care/ICU, which is where I'm currently doing my final clinical rotation), and also "sensual" in the way you describe. I get a huge amount of satisfaction from manipulation physical materials and supplies–mixing drugs, priming IV tubing, changing dressings, etc. It's fun. And then there's the direct human contact, which is kind of exhausting for an introvert like me, but also really, really rewarding.
I'm guessing that jobs like electrician, plumber, etc, are probably similar in having both intellectually and sensorially stimulating aspects. Manual labor or construction leans more towards the sensory, engineering/science towards the intellectual (although some scientists get to play with cool equipment, samples, etc), math and programming are almost solely intellectual, and a great deal of office work seems to be neither.
There are a couple of questions this brings up for me. 1) Can "boring" jobs be made more sensual? I wonder how much of a difference it would make if offices were more colourful, contained obstacle courses, involved walking around more, etc? It sounds silly and even like a waste of time, but if it keeps employees engaged, it might save time. 2) Do boring jobs really need to be done by humans? I'm not talking about jobs like math and programming, which aren't 'boring', just unilaterally intellectual. 3) Can strongly intellectual jobs be reformatted in a more physical way? For example, in the future, could programmers and mathematicians manipulate symbols in the air, like Tony Stark does in Iron Man? This would at least activate significantly more visual cortex than symbols on a screen. And all of these options seem significantly more achievable, with current technology, than trying to change the human brain.
There is this aspect of coding (and I write code for a living), the very act of it, that I do find sensual, (I don't know if others perceive this in the same way or my calling it sensual is just a convenient metaphor for my experience) but as my fingers dance across the keyboard and I see my thoughts take shape on screen, there is a certain poetry there in the form of the combined sounds of my typing, the tactile feedback of the keys themselves and a well executed subroutine staring back at you. Writing that routine was not just a purely mental activity, it involved fine-motor skills, long hours of tapping away to get to stage where you don't even have to look down at the keys, you think the words and your fingers move, of their own accord, to put those words on screen! (This is even better if you use a good tool, such as Vim, to maximize the efficiency of your keystrokes. It's also the reason why I find it supremely satisfying to use mechanical keyboards.)