You shouldn’t carelessly think you are necessarily wise enough to edit humanity without destroying it in the process. Things like “depression” “anxiety” “schizophrenia” are probably not neatly packed away in tidy little boxes you can remove from your brain without any side-effects at all.
I’m not saying that disentangling what we want to preserve will be easy. But the quote speaks in absolutes—fixing the code that causes schizophrenia or Capgras syndrone is prohibited because that would destroy our humanity.
It’s conflating the problem of Hidden Complexity of Wishes with Justification-for-being-hit-on-the-head-every-day.
The quote neither speaks in absolutes nor does it prohibit anything.
Quotes must be compact and pithy to be quotable. If a quote refers to “advanced humans of the future,” it is quite reasonable to expect they are talking about healthy, typical humans, and not referring to the repair of defects that only occur in some humans.
The quote expresses a wistful sense of loss at a choice to clean out the evelved code that makes up our kernel. It doesn’t prohibit anything.
I think the questions relevant to the quote would be should we avoid editing out crying at cute kitten videos, sitting with your grandmother while she tells you the same story for the 21st time, wearing a “kiss me I’m Polish” pin on st. patrick’s day, laughing at three stooges movies, and swooning when a nice boy writes you doggerel or gives you an “Oh Henry” candy bar.
In rewriting the part of the code that evolution put in, all sorts of idiosyncratic behavior will be written out. The fact that the root idio means self, personal, private will not make it any easier to replace the evolved code with rationalized, readable, maintainable code without losing all sorts of behaviors whos purpose is nearly unknowable when looking at the existing code.
Since anxiety, depression, and especially schizophrenia are features of humanity which exist to a negative degree only in some of us, it will probably be possible to fix these by writing patches that operate on the relevant minds that have these features, and will not reqiure touching the evoluion-written code.
We shouldn’t edit humanity to remove depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and other mental illness?
No thanks—instead, let’s avoiding totally pointless wasting of human capability.
You shouldn’t carelessly think you are necessarily wise enough to edit humanity without destroying it in the process. Things like “depression” “anxiety” “schizophrenia” are probably not neatly packed away in tidy little boxes you can remove from your brain without any side-effects at all.
This has been somewhat discussed at Devil’s offers
I’m not saying that disentangling what we want to preserve will be easy. But the quote speaks in absolutes—fixing the code that causes schizophrenia or Capgras syndrone is prohibited because that would destroy our humanity.
It’s conflating the problem of Hidden Complexity of Wishes with Justification-for-being-hit-on-the-head-every-day.
The quote neither speaks in absolutes nor does it prohibit anything.
Quotes must be compact and pithy to be quotable. If a quote refers to “advanced humans of the future,” it is quite reasonable to expect they are talking about healthy, typical humans, and not referring to the repair of defects that only occur in some humans.
The quote expresses a wistful sense of loss at a choice to clean out the evelved code that makes up our kernel. It doesn’t prohibit anything.
I think the questions relevant to the quote would be should we avoid editing out crying at cute kitten videos, sitting with your grandmother while she tells you the same story for the 21st time, wearing a “kiss me I’m Polish” pin on st. patrick’s day, laughing at three stooges movies, and swooning when a nice boy writes you doggerel or gives you an “Oh Henry” candy bar.
In rewriting the part of the code that evolution put in, all sorts of idiosyncratic behavior will be written out. The fact that the root idio means self, personal, private will not make it any easier to replace the evolved code with rationalized, readable, maintainable code without losing all sorts of behaviors whos purpose is nearly unknowable when looking at the existing code.
Since anxiety, depression, and especially schizophrenia are features of humanity which exist to a negative degree only in some of us, it will probably be possible to fix these by writing patches that operate on the relevant minds that have these features, and will not reqiure touching the evoluion-written code.