The name and face of Daniel Gilbertson are recognized throughout the galaxy as symbols of swash-buckling neuroastronaut adventure.

Gilbertson started his internal-explorations while a graduate student at Oxford.  He subsequently made documentary films on the desert, the deep seas, the underworld and in high orbit.  Daniel spent the next decade as a staff hedonist at the then fledgling University of Space.  he later went on to win the Pleasure Decathalon at the Hedonic Olympics of 1980, 1984 and 2002.

Daniel's career took an unexpected twist in 2001 when he designed the first 100% collimation-free microdisc sound processor with synaptic cleft micromote regulators and built-in quadrophonic headphones.  Proceeds went to the establishment of a non-profit social athletic club -- "The Space Nomads" -- dedicated to humankind's spirit of undying adventure.  (Their motto:  Nothing Human is Strange to Us.)  During his fourteen-year tenure as a Senior Fellow of The Space Nomads, Daniel operated his own deep space safari company and lectured regularly on the future of social evolution.

He also laid the original plans for the Phoenix Rising Animal Reserve which pioneered zero-gravity back-breeding techniques, recreating the Dodo and many other formerly extinct species.

His major accomplishments, however, came in the field of High Orbital Architecture and Design.  The thousands of Mini-Earths he designed can be recognized throughout the solar system by their understated beauty and elegance.

Daniel Gilbertson was last seen heading towards Alpha Centauri to scout locations for a film version of his #1 best-selling paperback, Little Known Trails of the Alpha Centaurian Black Hole.

Reprinted from SCIENTIFIC AMERICA, August 1979

The Ups of Pleasure and Downs of Satisfaction
by Daniel Gilbertson

Hive-moralists for millennia have lamented the innate, pervasive tendency of human beings to kick-out in bursts of irrationality and pleasure seeking.  Extrasocial self-indulgence.

It is important to distinguish between two very different hedonic reactions.

1. Hedonic experiences caused by activating higher-faster-future brains at the service of and controlled by self.  Pleasures.

2. Intoxication and narcotic escape experiences caused by activating slower-lower circuits.  Satisfactions.

Both of these experiences take consciousness away from domesticated robothood.  Pleasures move one into the past-social-self-actualized future.  Up from hive routine.  Intoxicants, tranquilizers and narcotics move one back to the past -- down from domestication, to primate and mammalian instinctual satisfactions.

Civilized terrestrial humans, robotically and blindly harnessed to species tasks, dependent upon gene-hive rewards for duty well-done, apparently need to slow-down, turn-off, escape domesticated pressure.  Boredom and social inefficiency would result without some sequential opportunity to regress from hive morality, to activate the primitive circuits of the brain.  Intoxicants and narcotic escapes are built-in devices to allow ritual regression to earlier, lower, slower stages.  Their power and delight is that they are conventionally naughty.

The dutiful 11th Brain Domesticate and the 12th Brain Insectoid live in a reality centered upon hive duty.  The 10 earlier brains are there, but are taboo, often blanked from consciousness.  Every successful 11th and 12th brain civilization provides ritualistic means of allowing reactivation of the earlier brains -- temporarily naughty immorality, programmed animalism.  Permissible retrogression.  Brains, as we know, are turned on and off by means of neuro-transmitter chemicals.  Each civilization produces ritualistic drug-taking which allows temporary animalistic reversion.

This process is best seen in the Japanese culture -- surely the most insectoid society in world history.  The Japanese have developed ritualistic drunkenness which permits the Dutiful Nipponese to regress to animalism (Brains 4, 5, and 6).  Alcoholism, abuse of state-manufactured vodka, is also tolerated in the Soviet Union.

It is noteworthy that the German culture, another highly domesticated-duty society, allows its citizens a scheduled intoxication-regression in the Fasching-carnival.  And even the sober, tidy Swiss, permit each other a Springtime return to pseudo-bestiality when these paragons of 11th brain tidy familiarity become tipsy and lurch around like sodden bears shamelessly littering the streets of Basel with confetti!  (Masks are worn at these carnival regressions.  The Burghers do not want to have their inner animals seen.)

Other methods for ceremonial return of the animal-brain-stages involve totems exhibited at athletic events, parades, social gatherings.  Observe that the unrepressed emotions released at these events are not sexual.  Genital satisfaction is not the central motive.  Middle-age, middle-class folks return to pre-adolescence and become exhibitionistic monkeys or noisy, often savage mammals.  Recall South and central American football games in which thousands of spectators engage in physical violence directed against the territorial rival.

The orchestrated revival of earlier brains is a basic issue in any stable gene-pool.  Each of our 12 terrestrial brains has its own ego, demands activation, must be allowed to cut loose on some regular basis.  The best-run civilizations have worked out a weekly return of the regressed.  The domesticate works dutifully Monday through Friday.  Saturday SHe is allowed to assemble in animal-totem competitions -- the Bulldogs of Yale versus the Horned Toads of Texas Christian.  Saturday night the socially approved intoxicant is imbibed, permitting a temporary explosion of mammalian territorial competition and sexual low-jinks.  Sunday morning the chastened and hung-over domesticate attends a DNA adoration ceremony in which the dignified gene-hive Creator is recognized, the brief foray back to animalism exorcised.  The domesticate, purged and reborn, is ready to start the next week of hive duty.

So far we have discussed alcohol -- which triggers off mammalian reactions.  Another powerful set of neurotransmitters reconstruct even more primitive realities.  Narcotics reactivate 1st brain experiences and put the domesticate in touch with relaxed, floating, vegetative pre-terrestrial-marine neurological realities.

Narcotic drugs are approved when used in sickness rituals.  Symptomatic cries for help can stimulate shaman-doctors to offer the narcotic experience which activates lower-brain consciousness -- ancient, infantile, vegetative.  The taboo is necessary to hive discipline.  The narcotic return to marine status is so tempting, so inviting, that it must be administered by an Authority figure.  The domesticate is not allowed access to First Circuit neurotransmitters.  Self-administration of narcotics to actualize infantile responses cannot be tolerated for fear that everyone will reject the busy, hectic, adult demands of the hive and escape back to vegetative-ocean bliss.  The Doctor Ceremony is the method by which hive-society allows citizens to plug back into the early marine circuits.

An amusing diagnostic side-light on domesticated terrestrial civilizations:  It is acceptable to phone-in sick to the office and thus avoid work.  Hive-society recognizes that the insectoid slavery it imposes is basically lethal to the workers.  The ceremony of sick-leave is allowed.

It is impossible, however, to phone in "well" to the hive-center.  To announce:  "I feel so good today, I'm not coming in to work."  In the hedonic society of the future (when the Dom-Species is 14th Brain) provision will be made for "well-leave" in addition to "sick-leave."

The difference between intoxicant-narcotic behavior and hedonic behavior should now be clear.  The former engages earlier-slower-lower instinctual brains.  The latter moves consciousness and behavior into the self-actualized future, engages future neural circuits.  The former are rewards for the over-worked domesticate.  The latter are genetic endowments, new brains presented, ready-or-not, by the evolutionary process -- not earned, but grown-into.

ALL THE REALITIES WE SHALL EVER KNOW ARE CREATED BY THE CONVERSATION BETWEEN DNA AND CNS (CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM).  THE DNA BLUEPRINT OF EVOLUTION, PAST AND FUTURE, CAN BE DECIPHERED AS WE TAP INTO THE DNA-CNS CHANNEL.

WALL GRAFFITI

CIRCA 1996

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