[extropy-chat] autism

[Anne Corwin]

Damien said:
  > Is the situation different with people wired for endogenous 
> depression or schizophrenia?
   
  It depends, I think...I don't know how deeply those traits run, or how many aspects of a person's being (whatever they perceive that as) are attached to them.  I am generally against forcing treatment on anyone, but I realize that sometimes people honestly *don't* know what is good for them (e.g., as in the case of alcoholism), so I'm not 100% sorted on what I think the ethics of treatment ought to be.  I don't think anyone really is at this point in history.
   
  > On a non-core-identity level: I suffer from (and I *do* suffer, I'm 
> impaired by it) a developmental disability, the lack of stereopsis. 
> Fixing that now would require perhaps extensive neural rewiring. The 
> outcome might be that since my experience of the world suddenly 
> bursts into an additional dimension, my writing and perhaps my 
> thinking would change at least subtly as well. (This actually 
> happened to philosopher David Chalmers; I'm not sure whether it 
> modified his sense of self.) I'm not just *non-typical*--I'm damaged, 
> experientially diminished. And make no bones about it.
   
  Well, if you perceive your condition as something that makes you suffer, and you don't think it's attached to anything important (or you would be willing to risk losing something you do find important in the process of altering your condition), that's really up to you to make that call.  
   
  In case it hasn't been made clear yet, I don't advocate forcing people to keep their default configurations (see my example of gender reassignment in my previous post, for instance) if they don't like those configurations.  I just think that societies need to become more flexible and accomodating to all different sorts of people, and that if society was more flexible and accomodating, fewer people would be under coercive duress.  
   
  I don't doubt that there are still gay people nowadays who stay in unhappy hetero relationships because they can't legally marry who they want to -- and I don't think that the answer to this is to make all gay people straight.  Flexible, diverse societies are stronger and more resistant to existential risk in the long run. I fear that if we make a practice of simply eliminating traits that are poorly understood on the basis that they disallow a person from functioning optimally in society *as it is configured now*, that's like saying that the way society is configured now is the best we can do.  As a transhumanist I can't abide that kind of lack of imagination.
   
  - Anne

Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:
  At 10:02 AM 4/24/2007 -0700, Anne wrote:

>And I'm also concerned about the idea that some people would gladly 
>"cure" their children even if the net effect of that "cure" would be 
>that you had an entirely different person than you had before. Is 
>that ethical?

Is the situation different with people wired for endogenous 
depression or schizophrenia?

On a non-core-identity level: I suffer from (and I *do* suffer, I'm 
impaired by it) a developmental disability, the lack of stereopsis. 
Fixing that now would require perhaps extensive neural rewiring. The 
outcome might be that since my experience of the world suddenly 
bursts into an additional dimension, my writing and perhaps my 
thinking would change at least subtly as well. (This actually 
happened to philosopher David Chalmers; I'm not sure whether it 
modified his sense of self.) I'm not just *non-typical*--I'm damaged, 
experientially diminished. And make no bones about it.

Damien Broderick


_______________________________________________
extropy-chat mailing list
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat



"Like and equal are not the same thing at all!"
- Meg Murry, "A Wrinkle In Time"
       
---------------------------------
Ahhh...imagining that irresistible "new car" smell?
 Check outnew cars at Yahoo! Autos.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20070424/9d4ac634/attachment.html>