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shminux comments on Open thread, September 15-21, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Let's first separate sexual aspects from the need for other companionship. Suppose everyone gets their sexual needs, if any satisfied by catgirls+ (+ for the upgrade which includes relationship problems if necessary). If you have a crush on your coworker (or your sibling, ew!), just add a catgirl copy of them to your harem.
Further suppose that the reproduction aspect is also taken care of.
Now you have a race of essentially asexual humans, as far as human-to-human interactions go.
The question is, does it make sense to have friendbots? What, if anything, is lost when you switch from socializing with meat humans to socializing with simulated ones?
This strikes me as superstimulating. In particular, the more cat girls you have, the more and kinkier cat girls you want.
Not necessarily, Plenty of people are happy with vanilla sex (or without). I suspect that even the kinkiest ones out there also have their limit. If not, let's talk about those who do.
That's because vanilla sex isn't as stimulating. The more superstimulating something is, the more experiencing it causes you to want more of it.
That doesn't seem to be the case, see e.g. yummy food.
I think you're confusing "stimulating" and "addictive".
For people who are into one or another variety of kink, or would be if only they knew about it / were prepared to try it. I don't think it's obvious that that's everyone.
That "explanation" is easily falsified. There are plenty of people who tried kinkier sex, enjoyed it, but reverted back to vanilla. There are plenty of people who tried roller-coasters once or twice but decided it's too much "stimulation".
Different people have different thresholds. If I remember the study correctly, none of the rats that tried directly stimulating their pleasure center ever went back.
Rats != people...
Yes, well it would be unethical to repeat that experiment with people.
People, however, (as shminux said) do try kink all the time. It would not be unethical to do a study on people who are already kinky and see if they get kinkier over time.
Anecdotally, they start doing kink, they either decide it isn't for them and stop, or they do get kinkier for a while - because they're exploring what they like and it makes sense to start at the less extreme end of things.
Then they figure out what they like, which is often a range of things at differing levels of 'kinkiness/extremeness', and do that.
I mean, it's almost trivially obvious that compared to the size of the kink community, there is an almost negligible amount of people doing the human equivalent of directly stimulating their pleasure centres to the exclusion of everything else. They tend to make the news. The moderately kinky majority do not.
Well, there have been experiments on humans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleasure_center#Human_experiments
It's not self-evident to me that they are separable.
When my heterosexual male friends tell me companionship isn't about sex I ask them how many male companions they've had. Not many, I've gathered from the silence.
For hetero males the usual term for male companions is "close friends". I bet the great majority have some.
But go ask some hetero women whether they think sex and companionship are well-separable :-/
Also I get the feeling 21th century Americans have fewer close friends than the historical human norm.
I don't know what the "historical human norm" is and I suspect there is a lot of variation there.
Try reading literature written before the past 50 years and preferably before the 20th century. That will give you an idea.
I am afraid Victorian England is not all that representative of the historical human norm.
I wasn't primarily thinking of Victorian England. Also "before the 20th century" isn't just the 19th century.
In Finnish the connotations of "companion" are more obviously sexual I see, at least in my circles.
It's probably a language issue, in standard English the word "companion" has no sexual overtones.
More to the point, this subthread is explicitly about separating sex from companionship.
Ah, but it's quite likely that they're heteroromantic as well as heterosexual.
Perhaps, but why haven't I come across any homoromantic heterosexuals or heteroromantic homosexuals?
AFAIK people with mismatched romantic and sexual orientations, though very much existent, are quite rare and the -romantic terms are most often used by asexual spectrum people to describe their romantic preferences.
Asexuals with romantic orientations came across my mind too. I can't imagine romantic and sexual orientations as separate, but the stakes aren't high enough for me to commit the typical mind fallacy so I'll keep my mind open to the possibility :)