Peter Corinth thinks that somatic control by enhanced intelligence will result in:
an end to psychosomatic diseases;
control by will alone of many organic problems;
an end to pain;
no need for doctors because everyone will learn enough medicine to cope with whatever illnesses remain;
many centuries of lifespan;
no senility.
Corinth discounts immortality because that would involve overloading of experiences and exhaustion of the nervous system although Poul Anderson's own later The Boat Of A Million Years contradicts this.
This is Corinth's "Protean man -" (p. 138)
Corinth uses the adjective, "protean," one more time when he says that "'...pure logical mind is so protean...'" (p. 141) that hyperintelligent organisms, whether human beings or giant spiders, will discount their physical differences. I think that "giant spiders" is a hopelessly inadequate way to envisage extraterrestrial intelligences. Maybe we will get some data in our lifetimes.
2 comments:
Memory doesn't work the way people thought until recently. It's continually edited, and purged of stuff.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: Almost all of what Corinth speculates about are too fantastic for me to take seriously. But BRAIN WAVE belongs to Anderson's earliest years as an SF writer, and at least he handled such ideas better than many other writers.
Mr. Stirling: And I recall you agreeing with me that, given what you wrote above in similar ways in another combox, even long-lived humans won't need special memory editing treatments, they would simply forget what they don't need to remember.
I recall Anderson using the idea that, after 1000 years, humans would suffer from memory overload in "Pact" (first pub. in 1951). And special treatments were used for that kind of hypothetical problem in WORLD WITHOUT STARS and FOR LOVE AND GLORY. However, the quasi-immortals of THE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS seems to have managed to edit, purge, or forget unwanted memories. Which was necessary to overcome the periods of "senility" several of them suffered.
Ad astra! Sean
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