Low level hedonism is a maschochism
(https://www.webroot.com/us/en/resources/tips-articles/internet-pornography-by-the-numbers)
https://fightthenewdrug.org/how-porn-sex-technology-is-contributing-to-japans-sexless-population/
Continuing on the note of online pornography, addiction, digital representation
In regards to online porn particularly we are having less of what we are representing. This is a loss of realizable potential. The perfect example of substituting the desire to directly experience what we actually want and finding counterfeit or making counterfeit versions of it. There is a perfect example of this in play in an example found in a baby boomer trend. The increasingly industrialized, suburbanized baby boomers’ had a generational obsession with the old west. They want what they can’t have, the freedom, the simplicity, and the ruggedness the cowboy archetype embodies. He is everything they want to be and can’t be.
Actual, real, direct, attainable, and sustainable, meaningful, pleasure is cut off, isolated, replaced, and substituted for a phony simulacrum of this pleasure which actually retards and handicaps the brain circuitry which regulates and produces this pleasure response. And our actual sex lives if we have any, are regulated by this simulacrum, or better yet existentially downgraded, since the act itself becomes identified with its representation, rather than its direct expression. We can only find a home in the counterfeit of our desires.
Porn addicts do experience brain damage. The neurochemical reason for this is due to overstimulation and eventually degrading of certain areas of the brain. This can and does result in loss of willpower-executive function. And perhaps a relevant anecdote: a materialization, depersonalization of women, which is a fissure between you and the other half of the species. It widens an interpersonal wall between you and the other sex.
Really distorting perception and blocking off normal inter-sexual relations.
An academic article on internet pornography addiction reads, “Many recognize that several behaviors potentially affecting the reward circuitry in human brains lead to a loss of control and other symptoms of addiction in at least some individuals. Regarding Internet addiction, neuroscientific research supports the assumption that underlying neural processes are similar to substance addiction”. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4600144/
The level of dopamine secretion in the brain engaged by pornography has no rival or parallel in nature whatsoever. Porn’s effects on the brain can be described as acting like that of a super drug. The user actually is damaging the dopamine reward system which is the single mediator between our bodies and the pleasure which can be gained or accessed normally/naturally. They are crippled by these effects. They are handicapped by this dopamine feedback loop which closes the possible attainable pleasure in life or pleasure from life. As well as closing the very real sense of acting on one’s own will.
The reason why this is so relevant philosophically is we take for granted our own ability to filter what we want out of us, through our power of will, our self-control. But this is nonsense, the chemical balance that makes people who they are if thrown off just a hair can change their whole emotional state, their personality, their relationship to others. Being you is being in a perfectly balanced chemical equilibrium. “We” are finely tuned systems that can be set off-kilter very easily. Also, the very will itself is altered and replaced by this very same dopamine feedback loop, damaging our very necessary and very important neural reward system.
This online trend of internet pornography is just a reflection of our collective masochism, self-loathing, self-destruction disguised as hedonism. When in fact the person is able to literally attain less pleasure than the normal person, his equipment for doing so is damaged. Pleasure is just a neural circuit and it can be damaged.
Real hedonism should be concerned with sustaining, attainable, pleasure, and doing so in a way that allows its continued consumption, and access. This online porn literally fits the definition of masochism: gaining pleasure from one’s pain. Or for our purposes, one’s neural destruction.
This is also just the neuroscientific effects of this digital masochism. This does not account for the ontological degradation and alienation which is taking place in more pronounced ways and at higher levels. Pornography is just a microcosm, and it does more damage to the person than mere bodily harm; it damages the person’s comprehension of the most meaningful activity for many they will engage in their lives.
In quiet, dull isolated post-industrial lives, sex is on an island, one of the few remaining avenues or arenas where immense and intense sensory stimulation is still in reach. It is the only activity in life where direct stimulation of the organs is possible. Food being of course a poor substitute for this. The pleasure from this is simply not available in any other area of life. Simulacrum, or pornography which I have identified as digital machoism, is the philosophy of the internet. It replaces the actual act of sex and sexuality with a simulacrum a phony, to quote Jean Badudrllad we are dealing with hyperreality. “Hyperreality is the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced societies.[8]”https://www.mlsu.ac.in/econtents/2289_hyper%20reality%20boudrilard.pdf
Or in other words when the simulation of sex replaced the act then sex is over. Sex is a power that can generate life-changing pleasure which brings a person up in the stratosphere above the petty, arduous and banal, pain, and bore of the culture we are all trapped in, the pleasure which cuts through the miasma of his or her entire nihilistic era. An act which is the condition for sustaining the final remaining remnant of our nature, the “couple” more than a sociological unit, it is a living organism. The final vestige of our former paleolithic tribal nature. Real, actual, romantic relationships, with someone you care for, supply us with enough wholeness to make industrial pressures and stresses endurable, or more endurable.
And the only thing, which can make such stresses endurable, if not the fulfillment of love, then hope, the aim, the pursuit of love, which is the only real aim or dream that can bring lasting happiness for many of us, in my view anyway. This is all lost when we masochistically botch off the real for the hyperreal.
These are the effects of the imposture of hedonism we are talking about. This is only one example, social media itself is a dopamine feedback loop that harvests and mines your pleasure response. The drive and expansion of these technologies are predicated entirely on advertising, and the point of course is to waste your time. Your time is a resource to be mined, and your dopamine is a drug to be exploited to keep you coming back for more. Social media could as well be the face of this new masochism. Micro-identities spawned by the internet seem to replace real living communities with counterfeits.
Filmed around the globe and drawing on personal video and local footage, "The Virus That Shook the World" documents how people and countries responded to COVID-19 across cultures, races, faiths & privilege.
— FRONTLINE (@frontlinepbs) December 3, 2021
STREAM NOW: https://t.co/5juOJTq7Pl pic.twitter.com/tql6VXggM6
Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/on-being-with-krista-tippett/id150892556?i=1000543769935
Mass tragedies sometimes have unexpected consequences.
...Of course, for meaningful lessons to be learned from a tragedy — whether a factory fire or a pandemic — you have to begin by acknowledging the facts of the event itself. The rise of Covid denialism, in America and elsewhere, is often taken as a reason to doubt that any progress will grow out of the tragedy of Covid-19. But as depressing as anti-science belligerence can sometimes be, there is abundant evidence that we are learning from this epidemic. To begin with, the period from March 2020 to May 2020 almost certainly marked the most significant short-term change ever in worldwide human behavior. Vast sections of the planet effectively froze in place for a few months, and then adopted, en masse, a whole new set of routines to flatten the curve and slow the spread — a genuinely new trick for Homo sapiens. It was not obvious in advance that such a thing was even possible.
Imagine, if you can bear it, what happens the next time word emerges of a novel virus devastating a midsize city somewhere in the world. The slow-motion reaction that characterized the global response to the news from Wuhan in early 2020 would be radically accelerated. Even without public-health mandates, a significant part of the world’s population, particularly in cosmopolitan cities that were hit hard in the early days of Covid, would instantly mask up; where possible, workers would switch back to Zoom; unnecessary travel would cease. No doubt some portion of the population would play down the magnitude of the threat or invent a preposterous conspiracy theory to explain it. But a meaningful number of people would switch back into the “pandemic mode” they learned in 2020-21...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/22/magazine/covid-progress.html?smid=em-share
Researchers can now design and mass-produce genetic material — a technique that helped build the mRNA vaccines. What could it give us next?
...In a way, that future has arrived. Gene synthesis is behind two of the biggest “products” of the past year: the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. Almost as soon as the Chinese C.D.C. first released the genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 to public databases in January 2020, the two pharmaceutical companies were able to synthesize the DNA that corresponds to a particular antigen on the virus, called the spike protein. This meant that their vaccines — unlike traditional analogues, which teach the immune system to recognize a virus by introducing a weakened version of it — could deliver genetic instructions prompting the body to create just the spike protein, so it will be recognized and attacked during an actual viral infection.
As recently as 10 years ago, this would have been barely feasible. It would have been challenging for researchers to synthesize a DNA sequence long enough to encode the full spike protein. But technical advances in the last few years allowed the vaccine developers to synthesize much longer pieces of DNA and RNA at much lower cost, more rapidly. We had vaccine prototypes within weeks and shots in arms within the year.
Now companies and scientists look toward a post-Covid future when gene synthesis will be deployed to tackle a variety of other problems. If the first phase of the genomics revolution focused on reading genes through gene sequencing, the second phase is about writing genes. Crispr, the gene-editing technology whose inventors won a Nobel Prize last year, has received far more attention, but the rise of gene synthesis promises to be an equally powerful development. Crispr is like editing an article, allowing us to make precise changes to the text at specific spots; gene synthesis is like writing the article from scratch...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/24/magazine/gene-synthesis.html?smid=em-share
Returning to MTSU, January 2022-
Supporting the philosophical study of bioethics, biomedical ethics, biotechnology, and the future of life, at Middle Tennessee State University and beyond... "Keep your health, your splendid health. It is better than all the truths under the firmament." William James===
Our anchoring theme: the psychological and social dimensions of medicine and the life sciences from birth to death, with a special emphasis this semester on the ethics of pandemic and public health.
Texts 2022. We’ll begin with these texts:
- Bioethics: The Basics (Campbell) ”...the word ‘bioethics’ just means the ethics of life…”
- Beyond Bioethics (Obasogie) “Bioethics’ traditional emphasis on individual interests such as doctor-patient relationships, informed consent, and personal autonomy is minimally helpful in confronting the social and political challenges posed by new human biotechnologies…”
- Lifelines: A Doctor's Journey in the Fight for Public Health (Wen) “Public health saved your life today—you just don’t know it” is a phrase that Dr. Leana Wen likes to use. You don’t know it because good public health is invisible. It becomes visible only in its absence, when it is underfunded and ignored, a bitter truth laid bare as never before by the devastation of COVID-19.
Each student will also choose and report on an additional relevant texts pertaining to public health, thus enabling us to extend our study of the field by “crowd-sourcing” many more of the crucial issues it raises.
For more info contact phil.oliver@mtsu.edu
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Ending health disparities is too important a goal to cede to propagandists.
Last week, during a White House press briefing on COVID-19, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky urged Americans to get jabs for their kids. “We know that vaccination helps to decrease community transmission,” she said, “and protect those who are most vulnerable.”
Her message was succinct, accurate, and easy to understand. But it was at odds with new guidance from the American Medical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges. In a document called Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts, the AMA and AAMC urge physicians and other health-care workers to replace many “commonly used” words, such as vulnerable, with “equity-focused” alternatives, such as oppressed...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/leftist-language-policing-wont-fix-health-disparities/620695/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
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