Excellent question! There are basically three types of blissies. Type I blissies don’t experience any regular negative feedback, so they are not susceptible to punishments, complaints, insults, ridicule, exclusion, and all the other mechanisms regularly applied to stop people from executing dangerous, or merely annoying actions. Furthermore, the empathy of type I blissies is severely limited, because they cannot experience negative emotions. While they might understand that they might do something harmful, they have little motivation to care about that. Then there are type II blissies, which do experience negative emotions and therefore can behave more reasonably. Finally, there are type III blissies, which are not capable of perceiving negative emotions, but experience negative feedback in the form of reduced level of (super)happiness, so that they are motivated to avoid behaviors that elicit negative feedback. While type II and III blissies are at least somewhat integrated into regular society, type I blissies are typically ignored completely. And by “ignored” I mean that almost all people filter out their existence by technological perception filters. Normal people literally cannot see type I blissies.
From your description is seems that there is quite some “class difference” between type I blissies and other blissies. And it seems to me that the difference between normal beings and type II blissies may not be too large. Are there intermediate stages between a normal being and a type II blissies?
Yes, of course. It’s a frequent route towards blissificiation to start with enhancements that enhance one’s positive emotional experiences. Then one is somewhere between a normal person and a type II blissie.
What are the disadvantages of being a type II blissie, if you can experience heavenly bliss, but still act as reasonable person?
The problem is a matter of scaling. If your regular hedonic set point is astronomically high, then it usually takes an astronomically large negative valence to motivate you to react to any negative signal. Therefore, negative emotions are either amplified to hellish levels, or they are effectively ignored.
That sounds horrible! The incentive to switch to type I or type III must be immense for type II blissies.
Quite, so! Most switch to type III, which seems like a decent synthesis of functionality and freedom from actual suffering. This type is relatively stable. Some move on further to type I to remove the annoying dips in superhappiness, but most remain relatively reasonable members of society.
Are blissies found outside of the Exuberance or are they a phenomenon that’s exclusive to the Exuberance?
Blissification technology is widely available and there are significant minorities of type II or type III blissies in other V factions, particularly within the Balance. The Balance also features a substantial number of type I blissies, but other V factions don’t. There is one V factions which rejects blissification technology almost completely, and that’s the Exaltation.
What do type I blissies do, if they are “filtered out” by “normal people”?
They are effectively condemned to an existence of being passive consumers of the greatness of existence and culture. Effectively, they are ghosts which observe everything and interpret everything as being absolutely mindbogglingly awesome. They can still interact with each other, mostly by inviting the focus of others to the latest super-awesome thing they’ve just discovered.
Sounds like a mixture of drug- and social-media addicts. But don’t type I blissies ever develop the wish to change what they perceive and revert to another blissie type or want to become “normal” again?
Not really. While there may be moments in which a type I blissie is less than maximally amused be the things e perceives, the simple solution to that is to shift one’s attention to any of the myriad of other opportunities for entertainment.
I see. I noticed you used the “e” pronoun here. Are there any reasons you prefer that to the generic “they”?
I prefer “e” to “it”, because “e” implies person-hood. And I prefer “e” to “they”, because “e” is singular, while “they” is a plural form. I actually find it sad that the English speaking world has abandoned the use of the singular “thou” in favor of the plural “you”.
Does thou have any preferred pronouns?
I once had the idea to troll those who seem to fetishize preferred pronounce by using an actual probability distribution for my preferred pronouns, but I don’t really care enough about such formalities. He/him, they/them, e/em are all acceptable to me.
Fair enough! I think that we’ve reached another natural end to our current interview. I’m looking forward to the next one.
Alright. I sincerely thank thou for another marvelous interview!