[ExI] Limits of human modification

[Tara Maya]

I would eliminate superstitions, or our very bad ability to just statistics intuitively, which I believe is related to being superstitious. 

I would not eliminate religious feelings…IF, as I suspect, it is linked to our ability to understand other minds. You may be familiar with the theory that autism is a kind of mindblindness.  A theory of mine (which may be incorrect), is that the human need to address inanimate forces as spirits or gods (or patterns in the will of one all-powerful God) is a kind inverse mindblindness. If autistic people tend to treat other people as inanimate objects, the religious person is inclined to treat inanimate objects as if they were people. (Martin Buber celebrates this very tendency.) 

But I believe that the ability to write fiction is also directly related to this capacity. Creativity of this kind, storytelling specifically, is a like overdetermined mind sightedness. But, being a writer myself, I should hate to eliminate this ability in my children, or in the human race. I think some people also call this Emotional Intelligence.

Interestingly, when I did my genealogy, I was struck by the high percentage of clergymen there were in the earlier generations. (One of them had a daughter accused of witchcraft at Salem! She wasn’t killed because he put in a word for her.) Later generations had less clergy… but more fiction writers. 

Of course, if there were a way to untangle the ability to imagine other mind form the tendency to distrust science, that would be nice. I’m not really sure that’s a genetic issue, but maybe it is. Certainly I’ve noticed that even academics in the liberal arts who are atheists but still very “mind sighted” also seem to share an antipathy to science shared by the most uneducated and fanatical folk who otherwise have nothing in common with them. Odd! But maybe it’s just because people who are very story-wise are not often good at math and science. If you could boost one without losing the other, that would be my preference.

Tara Maya
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> On Nov 23, 2015, at 5:32 PM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> ​I assume that at some point in the future, every single human characteristic will be found to be determined, at least in part, by genes, perhaps quite a few of them.​ 
> 
> ​Yes to your question.  If they don't like immortality they have options.  Perhaps if there were a way to eliminate certain memories it would be easier to live longer.
> 
> Here's one for you all:  if you could eliminate religious feelings, tendencies to worship gods or even people, superstitions, would you?​

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