“As well as its reproductive functions, the activity you call sex is also a hyperbolized abstraction of a learning process which is ordinarily natural to humans, and in which children regularly engage without any awareness of this on the part of adults. Somehow, the adults cannot detect this form of activity, or their filters prohibit its detection. Even the children are not particularly clear about its nature, in part because adult language dismisses it. It is called ‘play’. But there is a way to ‘play minds’ that results in learning capacities unlike anything outside of science-fiction. And it is this ‘learning-momentum-exchange’ game that sex is an abstraction of.

The process is the cognitive-relational analog of sexuality. The basic idea is one where we pass expressions of interest, enthusiasm, curiosity, insight, creativity, mutual admiration, and wonder back and forth in such a way that each pass magnifies and informs the shared force that is being thus generated and sustained. We quickly begin to inhabit this force together. This is the cognitive-relational analog of the same force that begets human life in sexuality, but in sexuality the process is physical. Here, it is creative, heuristic, relational, and educational.

Once this process begins, it can be sustained almost indefinitely, and produces cascades of the orgasmic equivalent of learning, insight, and radical perspective revision. We can use this to learn in a week what it would take years of study to fail to properly comprehend, and because it is our natural way, it is not only catastrophically more effective, it is far healthier for our intelligences. Not only that, it is fun, and lends our lives meaning. Even our elderly are always at it, and many of them are amongst our most treasured catalysts. It is painful to imagine a culture in which this has been lost but physical sex preserved. One quails to think of the repercussions for human relation and intelligence.

In a sense, our minds are formed in such a way as to be capable of a variety of forms of superfunction under the aegis of unique modes of purpose and agreement that are alike with our nature. It is strange to think that you could have preserved only the physical expression, and actively inhibited its natural context… which is a form of explosively developmental liquid sentience… and the birthplace of genius and wisdom.

From our perspective, if you have sex but not this, it is like having the the stem of the peach, with which you can just taste a bit of fruit on the end, and never knowing what a peach is or might be. Perhaps more to the point, without this, you’ve removed the legs from the horse of your actual developmental opportunities. In every context.”

— an anonymous informant