Shouldn’t you be working on that phobia directly? Even without the part where it makes you want to die, it sounds pretty unpleasant. It might help to spend time around disabled people, especially those who aren’t just adapting to their disability but actively building culture around it, like the Deaf community. Paralympic athletes with better-than-natural accommodations also come to mind, but you might react better to people just going about their daily life in slightly unusual ways than to awesome flashy gizmos.
What is frightening you exactly? Your circumcision example suggests visibly losing body parts is the problem, but the rest of your post mentions loss of abilities more.
The image I associate with “something just more than nothing” is that of the kind of patients uncharitably called “vegetables”. Is that correct? I don’t know how much limits-pushing badassery appeals to you, but I’d like to present another view: someone with a broken body and a broken mind, who refuses to give up and every day deploys great courage and cunning and perseverance to achieve what you do without thinking, through pain and fear and confusion and repeated failure. It’s very bad, but the attitude is awesome.
Loss of abilities is something people can relate to more. The “permanent” part is more important than the “injury” part. A small scar nobody could see was a horrifying thought to me.
It extended to the mental as well. The thought that I might not be able to learn every language in existence in the narrow timeframe before my mind “hardened” against learning new languages was horrifying as well. (Particularly torturous, that one, because languages were dead-last on my list of things I needed to learn -soon-. I recognize Eliezer’s fear that he won’t be done with what he needs done by the time he’s 40 - but start those fears at age 7 and thinking it may already be too late and you might have some inkling of what my childhood was like.)
Is it any comfort that no injury can be permanent, since it’s vanishingly unlikely that we’ll find a way around the universe’s heat death but not around damage to human bodies in the next few billion years?
Shouldn’t you be working on that phobia directly? Even without the part where it makes you want to die, it sounds pretty unpleasant. It might help to spend time around disabled people, especially those who aren’t just adapting to their disability but actively building culture around it, like the Deaf community. Paralympic athletes with better-than-natural accommodations also come to mind, but you might react better to people just going about their daily life in slightly unusual ways than to awesome flashy gizmos.
What is frightening you exactly? Your circumcision example suggests visibly losing body parts is the problem, but the rest of your post mentions loss of abilities more.
The image I associate with “something just more than nothing” is that of the kind of patients uncharitably called “vegetables”. Is that correct? I don’t know how much limits-pushing badassery appeals to you, but I’d like to present another view: someone with a broken body and a broken mind, who refuses to give up and every day deploys great courage and cunning and perseverance to achieve what you do without thinking, through pain and fear and confusion and repeated failure. It’s very bad, but the attitude is awesome.
Loss of abilities is something people can relate to more. The “permanent” part is more important than the “injury” part. A small scar nobody could see was a horrifying thought to me.
It extended to the mental as well. The thought that I might not be able to learn every language in existence in the narrow timeframe before my mind “hardened” against learning new languages was horrifying as well. (Particularly torturous, that one, because languages were dead-last on my list of things I needed to learn -soon-. I recognize Eliezer’s fear that he won’t be done with what he needs done by the time he’s 40 - but start those fears at age 7 and thinking it may already be too late and you might have some inkling of what my childhood was like.)
Is it any comfort that no injury can be permanent, since it’s vanishingly unlikely that we’ll find a way around the universe’s heat death but not around damage to human bodies in the next few billion years?