Suppose, through some future technology, everyone could dial in their mood, deciding how they feel at any given moment of the day. What would such a world be like?<\/p>\n
If you need to focus for an exam, or pay attention in class, or maintain your poise during that potentially nerve-wracking job interview, just choose the appropriate settings. If later that evening you want to get frisky with your partner, no problem — you can both always be in the mood if you want to.<\/p>\n
If you have a fear of flying, you can set yourself, pre-flight, to Zen-like calm. Or maybe you want the high that can come from drinking, without its debilitating side-effects. Just set your mood knob to “elation”.<\/p>\n
Of course there would be limitations. The human brain has evolved built-in mechanisms at a very low level that compensate for any sustained deviation from the norm.<\/p>\n
For example, if you try to set your mood knob to ecstatic for too many hours at a stretch, your brain will work progressively harder and harder to bring you back down. You could eventually crash, and go into a depressive tailspin.<\/p>\n
But let’s say that these future technologies come with sensible brakes, so they don’t allow you to tweak your mood in ways that would actually cause you harm. Sort of the way an elevator will bring you up or down on command, but won’t let you crash through the roof or the floor.<\/p>\n
Would people who have access to such a technology be fundamentally changed by it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Suppose, through some future technology, everyone could dial in their mood, deciding how they feel at any given moment of the day. What would such a world be like? If you need to focus for an exam, or pay attention in class, or maintain your poise during that potentially nerve-wracking job interview, just choose the … Continue reading “If mood were voluntary”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15542"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15542"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15542\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15543,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15542\/revisions\/15543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}