[extropy-chat] Re: The Force of Human Freedom

[Greg Burch]

As a general principle, it’s a very good idea to not ingest chemicals that kill cells in your body or cloud your thinking, bind up your limbs so that they have no mobility, or to allow other people to painfully insert foreign objects into your body, cut you open and slice out parts of your body.  But when accident or disease strikes, every one of these things in the preceding list of horribles may be not only the right thing to do but may in fact be the only way to avoid more serious harm or even death.

But some people will avoid the rationally best therapy because they fear the pain or simple psychological invasiveness of the procedures that are required to stop the course of a disease or repair the result of an injury.  The perfectly rational avoidance of things like situations in which you allow someone else to knock you unconscious and cut you up stands in the way of necessary medical intervention.  Perhaps others will combine this loathing of the pain and invasion of medical procedures with guilt over true or false beliefs that they have brought the accident or sickness on themselves. 

More rationally, some people in some situations may choose to avoid a prescribed therapy because there is a risk that it may not work and may in fact make them more ill.  But the resolution of all these fears must be based on a rational weighing of risks and benefits.  If one has cancer, radiation or chemical therapy that in the interim makes you quite ill may in fact be the most rational choice.  If such radical therapies are the only hope, then the patient must be very vigilant of their health, and very careful to learn as much as possible about the course of treatment.  But they have to undergo the therapy if they want their health restored.

Simply avoiding surgery in every situation because it involves “men with knives,” or a cast on a limb with a broken bone in every situation because it involves “binding up my limbs,” or strong medicine in every situation because it involves “chemicals that kill cells in my body” is irrational per se.

GB