Monday, April 15, 2013

Johnny Wheel's Revenge and Hating Women

William here.

Today our conversation revolved around the addition of bionic enhancements to sports. While I personally believe that such a progression would destroy the ideal of the hard worker or naturally gifted technician, the opposing opinion was definitely well supported. Likewise, we once again discussed fairness and equality when it comes to policy based preferential treatment of genders. We also briefly discussed engineering happiness, and if happiness was only important because of its relationship to pain. I personally didn't believe so. I believe that if we could sustain elevated dopamine levels without "crashing", the euphoria produced wouldn't be affected by any past memory of pain. This is because chemical euphoria is not dependent on pain, social context, memory, or any other component of separate emotion, but is a feeling within it's own right. In any case, it was quite a controversial topic.

Also, we started a band called Johnny Wheels and the Phoenix. Hide yo kids, hide yo wife.

1 comment:

  1. I personally disliked this chapter in the book purely because of the subject matter (it was well written). I do not think the evolution of organized sports should have any bearing on whether or not we should 'enhance' ourselves. I'm pretty sure we could think of other ways to compete, even if one day baseball, football, and golf go the way of the Dodo. Maybe this is me just being a girl.
    I definitely support the argument that we can't be happy ALL the time, and that happiness is always going to be relative. Maybe one day we'll never go as low as we do now, but it won't matter because not having experienced that low, whatever the new threshold is will feel just as terrible. I think this was mentioned by Powers' character early on in the novel. Although everyone else saw her as unendingly happy, she herself claimed that she had good days and bad days just like everyone else.

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