X-Message-Number: 24737 Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 09:44:04 -0400 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: CryoNet #24734 - #24736 For Mike Perry (Msg 24735): Basically you are stating that whether or not someone eats too much is a matter of their will only. (I will point out that even at age 60 I myself remain far from overweight). To put this issue bluntly, this idea seems both too moralistic and too primitive. It's not that it's strictly false, it's just that it doesn't go far enough. So, very well, someone has grown fat because they lack the will to stop eating. Why then do they lack that will, and what's happening that makes them lack it? From my own experience with obese people, the simple observation that they lack the will to limit their calorie intake hardly helps at all. Humans have complex psychologies, even normal humans. Perhaps the appetite centers in an obese person's brain have for some reason grown too large and taken over when he/she comes to eating. That can happen for minor or important reasons in terms of how well their brain is working. I would not be at all surprised to learn that a subset of obese people suffer from a newly identified brain pathology. For that matter, strokes in just the right places can remove our inhibitions about eating, and we go off eating, eating and become fat when once we were thin. And I guess I come to one more Tale of Skastowe. Further along in the book you will find a tale named "The 'crimes' of Gosalveno". "crimes" is in quotes because Skastowe had no crimes in the sense in which we have crimes. It's not that someone could not disturb or even injure someone else, but that such incidents were dealt with quite differently than now. You see, the people of Skastowe understood much more deeply just how people work, and within wide limits reorganized the brains of anyone who might be overcome by an reasonless urge to hurt someone... and they gave such a person a choice, if he were troublesome enough: he could be put into a starship and sent off to colonize a very distant galaxy alone in the distant future, or he could allow his brain to be modified to eliminate that urge. It's far from obvious to me how a system which removed any tendency to reasonlessly hurt someone, even before it expressed itself, wouldn't be better than one which punished someone after they had hurt another. Such a system, of course, would require far more understanding of how brains work than we have now, so it's simply not possible now. Best wishes and long long life for all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=24737