[Barring entirely virtual food, of course]
Virtual food would obviously be possible in a post-FAI world, and I don't see any reason why most people would bother with non-virtual food if they could get the same experience (probably even the apparent experience of putting physical food into one's mouth and tasting and chewing and swallowing it and feeling satisfied) for free, in unlimited quantities, and in varieties not limited by regional or seasonal availability.
Though even if we entirely replace our bodies with better-designed ones that don't need actual food as fuel, I'm sure there could be VR simulations of the experience of emptying one's bowels, if anyone really misses it by that point...
In Second Life, many people use custom tools that trigger a virtual pregnancy from cybersex. At least one brand advertises realistic probabilities of conception, including variation on a monthly cycle. This suggests that some people may want to eat food that makes them poop, even if non-poop-causing food already exists (and is even the default).
This post is a formal request for everybody in this forum, who are the most likely humans to produce an FAI in the future, that in the possible resulting utopia some activity will still be available, even if they are not based on challenges of increasing complexity. I call these activity natural wireheadings, and since it is my right to determine my own fun-generating activities, I hereby formally request that some simple pleasure, listened below, will still be available at *any* point in my future cone, and that I will consider a dystopia any future which deprives me of these natural wireheadings (if anyone is still around caring for those things).
A (non-exhaustive) list of them includes the following:
- sex
- eating food/drinking
- feeling relieved for having emptied my bowels
- dancing
- the pleasure of physical activity (wood-carving, sculpting, running, etc)
- the rapture I feel when in the presence of a safe ancestral environment
- social laughter
- the pleasure of talking in a small, same-minded crowd
- listening to pop/metal/rap music
- the pleasure of resting when tired
- scratching an itch
-...
More will come!