Disability Culture Meets the Transhumanist Condition

But overall I can't think of any really good objections from the white point of view.

Is "my bodily autonomy is more important than your dreams of social justice" just being contrary?

I'd be really interested in hearing from some minority - whether in terms of race or sexual orientation or whatever - who wouldn't want her community to accept a coin toss on the principles described above.

What would such a coin toss look like for sexuality? If it comes up heads, everyone becomes straight, and if tails everyone becomes gay? That would have significant extinction concerns. Everyone becoming bisexual on tails is more reasonable, but it doesn't map onto the same sort of concerns, because now it's asymmetric: straight guys who become bisexual can still be attracted to women, but gay guys who become straight can't still be attracted to men. So maybe heads is everyone stays the same? But that's just odd- "we have this option, and either we'll do it or we won't."

I wouldn't mind moving from gay to bisexual, and I wouldn't mind gay culture disappearing. I suspect that everyone becoming bisexual would lead to a net social loss, though, even though I might be better off.

I wouldn't want transgendered people to all make a switch to identifying with the binary gender assigned to them at birth.

Sure, nobody would be picking on us for being trans, because we wouldn't be trans anymore. We wouldn't have to deal with any of the awful crap that society presses on us. We wouldn't have to deal with feelings of discomfort and alienation from our bodies (those of us that have such -- it's not a completely universal trait). We wouldn't have to worry about things like costly surgical procedures, the availability of psychologically-stabilizing hormone treatments, whether we'll be able to find clothing that fits and looks good, whether or not we want to aim for passing and how well we can do at that, and so on.

Those are things that make my life difficult, and they're often pretty horrific.

But the thing is? I also wouldn't be me. It is conceptually nontrivial to propose "a version of Jandila who isn't trans" -- that is a hypothetical individual who is a fundamentally different person, who experiences the world differently, who doesn't have my memories and my experiences of the world. Whole different person. Sure, you can speculate what'd have happened in some counterfactual timeline where the person born to my parents never wound up displaying this trait, but then so much of their life would have been so different from mine.

This is a problem for me because if the goal is to do well by people who are still alive, we have to actually listen to them to some extent about their preferences and needs. I wouldn't suffer so much or have as many challenges if I pushed a magic button that made me cis, but a lot of my problems don't have to be this way.

I wouldn't need to worry about surgery the way I do if it were something health insurance covered -- my condition is considered medical by all my providers and doctors and insurers, yet surgery to remediate it is handled not by meaningful standards of best practices and studied in medical schools or offered at a typical hospital. Instead it's a bit like buying a collector's item -- a lot of money, up front in cash, buyer's remorse is entirely your risk, it's considered a vanity rather than a necessity no matter what said medical profession's consensus is otherwise, and exceptions are thin on the ground.

Trans people wouldn't have nearly as much trouble getting hormone replacement therapy if our own medical needs were taught alongside other parts of endocrinology, and if medical research into our health was mostly directed at longitudinal studies of outcomes, treatment modalities and the like, and not predominantly focused on "what makes trans people trans?" (unhelpful to most actual people who are, but a great way to monopolize what little funding is available for research relevant to trans people)

I wouldn't have to worry nearly so much about never getting a job, or being assaulted or harassed, if trans people and acceptance thereof were more normalized in popular culture, if it weren't limited to the "deceptive/pathetic transsexual" dichotomy most of the tiny number of portrayals of us fall into -- because more people would be familiar with the idea, and (I can hope) might think of something other than those stereotypes.

There's a whole lot of stuff that various entities already extant in the world could do that would make it a lot easier for trans people to exist, without just offering us a magic "turn cis in a flash" pill. Yes, if we were like you we'd not be persecuted for being us, but we'd also not have to be persecuted that way if, y'know, people didn't persecute us. If people could recognize that we're targeted as a perceived group, lumped together whether or not we prefer to identify and live that way, and that even those of us who have no strongly-felt affiliation with any trans-specific cultural entity still suffer the effects of being perceived as part of that group.

Counterfactuals about making [minority who suffers/is persecuted/has disproportionately bad outcomes] go away by ensuring no more of them come into existence look a lot squickier when you're a member of that minority who can think of a few much less drastic things the majority could do to accomplish similar ends.

I think that tribalism expands to cover any differences. Some experience among various Orthodox Jewish groups is one piece of information in my background. Ideological divisions are unimportant within a group half the size of a congregation and important within a group the size of a congregation, regardless of the ideological diversity in the congregation.

Mothers can tell identical twins apart. Anything less than an extreme reduction in differences won't do much to reduce Schelling point in-group/out-group division.

Speech patterns are part of culture, and you mentioned them as one of the things which would be changed.

That objection could probably be covered by adding speech patterns rather than eliminating them.

How about religion? Would the atheists here be comfortable with a coin toss approach to being religious or not?

I'm ethnically Jewish (personally agnostic). I'm uncomfortable with Christianity in a way which I think is different from the way people who were raised Christian and who've had bad experiences are. I haven't had personal bad experiences with Christianity, but I'm not only edgy about it, but it's like Gandhi and the murder pill-- I'm not comfortable with the idea of fading out my discomfort, even though I can't see that it's doing me any good.

Being Jewish carries a lot of memories with it. I only go to a service if it's an important event for someone else, but if I do, I'm reasonably familiar with the ritual. I still like the Jewish folk songs I learned in Hebrew school. I suppose I could keep all that (from this paragraph) if the coin toss came up Unitarian, but not otherwise. It's not as though the folk songs are a secret, but no one else especially bothers to learn them.

The general point is that these differences aren't just pasted-on labels for the most part. (The exception I'm thinking of is a news story I read about an anti-Semite in Eastern Europe who found out he had Jewish ancestry, gave up anti-Semitism, and became observant. People are very strange.)

I'm not sure how useful arguments from completely imaginary tech are.

Other free association: I've read about an exercise where people were asked to list the labels they identified with, and the list tended to mostly include things they'd been hurt about.

I'd be really interested in hearing from some minority - whether in terms of race or sexual orientation or whatever - who wouldn't want her community to accept a coin toss on the principles described above.

I’m white and I wouldn’t be favourable towards the coin toss idea, but I’ll answer anyway since some of the reasoning might be the same.

Suppose that we had a machine that could change people's skin color, physical features, and speech patterns, so that people of one race could be turned indistinguishable from people of another. And suppose we wanted to end all racial discrimination forever by making everyone the same race. So we flip a coin to decide whether all white people have to change into black people, or all black people have to change into white people - discrimination disappears either way, and this way we know it's not a power thing where white people are trying to enforce their own norms.

Firstly, changing surface appearances wouldn’t necessarily end racial discrimination (i.e. physical similarity doesn't guarantee the absence of tribal identification; discrimination may be based on alleged biological differences that are not limited to surface characteristics). Furthermore I don’t see how pair bonding and attraction, and personal identity could be adequately preserved (for people in general) through substantial changes in physical appearance. For the sake of the thought experiment I suppose we can ignore this, though.

I would nonetheless object to the idea on the basis that it is needlessly illiberal. Why not just allow anyone to use the machine if they want to do so? If someone feels he is being discriminated against, then he is free to use the machine. If he is unwilling to use the machine, presumably the problem isn’t bad enough to merit trampling over the personal liberty and aesthetic values of others.

I'm white, and I don't think I would object too much if the coin came up as "all whites have to change to blacks." I could see some white people objecting on aesthetic grounds, that they've been conditioned to think white people are more attractive and don't want to be in bodies they would view as less attractive. I could imagine a whole bunch of white people objecting just to be contrary. But overall I can't think of any really good objections from the white point of view.

I presume that "conditioning" refers to social conditioning, i.e. being told or being subjected to media and insinuation that one ethnic group is more attractive than another.

Other (not mutually exclusive) possibilities:

1. Said aesthetic judgements are not purely due to "conditioning", but are (at least in part) formed by the same mental processes as other aesthetic judgements in general.
2. There are certain modules of the mind that render humans likely to form tribal attachments to their ethnic groups (non-EEA condition - just how the adaptations are expressed today). The in-group/out-group dichotomy influences sincere aesthetic judgements.
3. Humans are on average naturally attracted to somewhat similar-looking mates. This influences aesthetic judgements of other ethnic groups in general. Unpacking "natural", genetic causes might interact with early environment e.g. the ethnicity of the humans to which someone is exposed as an infant. #2 and #3 might be closely related causes.

I don’t see why aesthetics shouldn’t be considered a good reason for objecting to the change, whatever the case may be. I suppose humans might be expected to have second-order preferences in favour of allocating relatively little priority to aesthetic preferences that are merely socially conditioned - perhaps - but I don’t see any reason to assume that this is true of the aesthetic preference in question.

Furthermore, homogenising humanity might be considered an aesthetic disutility independent of any comparison between the aesthetic qualities of different ethnic groups – much in the same way that it is a shame when attractive and unique animal species become extinct. Human ethnic groups differ less than different animal species but as humans, the value that many of us attach to diversity and distinctiveness within the human species is magnified.

But overall I can't think of any really good objections from the white point of view.

My haaaaaaaaair!

(Lest I be accused of not taking this seriously, note that "My haaaaaaaaair!" is also the first objection I generate to the prospect of coming down with cancer, even though I know that is stupid.)

I don't think the anecdote (parable?) requires or implies that no black person would want to become white, just that a black person could feel that way, and wish to keep other blacks from making such a conversion, without being obviously malicious.

At least, I find that view (for black or deaf people) much more understandable than the view that drives the humans in the good ending of Three Worlds Collide [1], which is widely agreed with here.

[1] that view being, basically, that the loss of a planet of humans is an acceptable price to pay to preserve human "growing pains" (romantic strife, embarrassment, etc).

The best objection I can come up with is really more of a generalized diversity argument: that heterogenous genetic populations tend to be more robust against environmental stresses, and that the same is probably true for their memetic analogues. But there's nothing coding that objection to any particular phenotype, minority or otherwise, and I can certainly imagine scenarios where it might be outweighed by circumstances.

I don't think I'd personally care too much in the scenario presented -- it's conceptually squicky, but I wouldn't see it as a personal attack -- but then again I'm a white dude, so any of Yvain's caveats could just as well apply to me. My first impulse when I imagine painlessly homogenizing various points of contention where I do fall into the minority is to appeal to something similar to the above, though.

I'd be really interested in hearing from some minority - whether in terms of race or sexual orientation or whatever - who wouldn't want her community to accept a coin toss on the principles described above.

Hm.

So, I think that if actually offered such a coin toss for sexuality, with some kind of proviso that kept me from suddenly no longer being sexually attracted to my husband or vice versa (and that avoided similar problems for everyone else), I would ultimately conclude that the benefits of accepting such a coin toss outweighed the costs, and thus would want my community to accept it. (Note that this is a different question from whether I would impose the results of such a coin toss on my community.)

I'd be really torn, though, and the truth is I don't know how well I can predict my actual behavior in the event.

The same thing is true for being Hispanic, but I'm more confident that I'd endorse the cointoss there. Unsurprisingly, I identify less as Hispanic than I do as queer.

The same cointoss for Judaism is somewhere in between, and my anxiety considering it is high enough that my confidence that I can actually predict it is again pretty low.

As for where the anxiety/resistance comes from... I don't think it's anything surprising. Cultural identities feel very important and they are associated with whatever attributes they are associated with. Mess with those attributes, you mess with the associated identities, which feels threatening.

And, of course, in real-world situations (which don't have the magic properties you've posited for your thought experiment) such feelings of threat have historically often been justified. That is, historically, eliminating the distinctions between majority M1 and minority M2 frequently turns out to mean eliminating M2 altogether, or trying to. And, hey, if M1 is going to act against M2's collective interests, then M2 had damned well better be prepared to act collectively in their mutual interests, or they're going down... so it's not too surprising that our instincts trend that way. (of course, one can come up with evo-psych justifications for anything, so that's not worth much.)

Deaf people can also do things that hearing people can't. They are completely immune to noise and auditory distractions. I can imagine a future in which people pay for getting an implant that grants them voluntary deafness powers. I'd buy it.

Apart from that bit of pedantry, I agree with your comment.

But is the ability to distinguish a discrete and limited number of tones that you have to learn to interpret properly to have any benefit from at all (even more so if the person in question was born deaf) worth an invasive medical procedure?

All things being equal, you are of course correct. If cochlear implants cost €1, could be worn like earbuds and replicated normal human hearing perfectly, this wouldn't be an issue at all. The issue is precisely the fact that all things are not equal.

In at least one sense, hearing people ARE better than deaf people. I'm not saying they have more moral worth, I'm saying that, all other things being equal, the hearing person can do things that the deaf person can't.

You're conflating being better at something with being better. "In at least one sense, white people ARE better than black people. All other things being equal, they can pursue more opportunities with less discrimination." How is that a useful observation?

If that is sufficient grounds to conclude that bearing and raising a deaf child is grounds for taking that child away from me (either now, or in our hypothetical transhumanist future), it seems to follow that failing to reconfigure my child to benefit from any technologically achievable augmentation should equally be grounds for doing so.

Does it follow? The way I see it it doesn't follow that a parent taking away a kid's IPhone must necessarily be treated as if they had taken away their hearing or their eyesight. The former would be normally considered legitimate parenting, the latter would normally be considered criminal child abuse (though similar is still done in some parts of the world in the form of female genital mutilation).

Our moral instincts currently differentiate between health/ability and technological luxury. How this will be changed in a transhumanist future is a question I don't yet feel qualified to answer.

A lot of religious material, particularly Christian, might qualify.

I definitely agree that a mature transhuman society would probably regard these sort of issues as non-problems. That's certainly where I want to end up, if I end up anywhere at all. But such a society might have its own equivalent problems: What do you think of genetically propagated religion?

My real concern, though, is with the transition period: How do you legislate, say, a medical procedure that can only be applied to young children? How to you handle people who adamantly want to pass on their "unique" genetics to their children? Do you get the same answer for autism as for blindness? What about for being really short? What about for a genetic disorder that might kill you?
For that matter, how do you handle people who want to indoctrinate their children into Scientology? Christianity? Islam? Do you think that no possible biological state can have so much influence?

That does seems relevant, but I have a very hard time articulating precisely what's relevant about it and what follows from that.

At some point it becomes a form of abuse, I think. Being gay doesn't really involve losing something internally, relative to being straight. Even the possible losses due to social norms strike me as involving relatively little utility, unless your identity happens to strongly involve being gay. But I don't have a fully specified theory, or any good way of avoiding all the usual failure modes for social intervention. At the same time, I'm not willing to say "oh well" and let people destroy themselves (or others) if I can help it.

It's not clear to me how this difference justifies the distinction in my thinking I was describing.

I believe the difference is that in the case of deaf people, you are improving their lives by giving them more abilities to achieve the values they have (in this case, an extra sense). By contrast, with queerness you are erasing a value a person has and replacing it with a different value that is easier to achieve. I believe that helping a person achieve their existing values is a laudable goal, but that changing a person's values is usually morally problematic, even if their new values are easier to achieve than their old ones.

Now, keep in mind that I am speaking in principle, not in practice. In the real-life case of deafness this issue is more complicated than the way I just described it. There are other issues, for instance, the value of an extra sense is to some extent tied to the support mechanisms society has developed for it. I think that the deaf community may be voicing a valid concern that society has good set of support mechanism for people who are fully deaf and fully hearing, but not as good mechanisms for people with the kind of mid-range hearing that cochlear implants provide.

But those are concerns of practice, not principle. In principle having extra senses should make it easier to achieve your values. I mean, wouldn't you want super-hearing, microscopic vision, etc if you could get them without any side-effects.

How do we tell whether what I value is to find a mate of Type A, or to find a mate I find attractive?

I think the fact that you are unwilling to have your criteria for attractiveness be modified is good evidence that it is the former and not the latter.

Is this simply a semantic disagreement -- that is, do we just have different understandings of what the phrase "who I am" refers to? Or is there something we'd expect to observe differently in the world were you correct and I mistaken about this?

I think there are two issues, one is semantic, the other is that I did completely understand what you meant by being changed into someone who isn't queer.

First, the semantic issue. I have been trying to approach the issue of Personal Identity by righting a wrong question. Instead of asking "Am I the same person as him?" I instead ask "How desirable would it be for me to change into that person?" I find that this approache generates the same intuitive results as traditional approaches to personal identity (for instance both approaches identify being killed and being wireheaded as very undesirable outcomes) but doesn't get bogged down by the issues of what exactly it means to be "the same."

Saying that you literally wouldn't be the same person was hyperbolic of me. I was trying to draw attention to the fact that our values are an important part of who we are, and that changing our values can change our identity. It would be more accurate to say something like "the new you is only 90% the same person as the previous you."

The other issue is that I don't think I quite understood what you meant when you talked about being changed. To give a framework to what I mean, I call your attention to Yvain's famous post on Wanting, Liking, and Approving. When you talked about being changed to not be queer, I assumed you meant that your Wanting, Liking, and Approving stats had all been changed. You had been changed so that you wanted to not be queer, liked it, and deeply approved of this fact.

However, this does not match your description of what you imagine the subjective experience of being modified to not be attracted to men would be like. You say:

If I woke up tomorrow morning and I was no longer sexually attracted to men, that would be startling, and it would be decidedly inconvenient in terms of my existing marriage, but I wouldn't be someone else, any more than if I stopped being sexually attracted to anyone, or stopped liking the taste of beef, or lost my arm.

That sounds to me like your Wanting and Liking stats have been modified, but your Approving stat has stayed the same.

I consider the "Approving" portion of your personality to be a much bigger part of your personal identity than "Wanting" and "Liking." So if the change left the "Approving" portion of your personality intact, I would completely agree with you that you are still the same person that you were before, regardless of what personal-identity framework I am using.

Evolution in its conventional meaning of changes in a population caused by differential breeding success of individuals coupled with descent-with-modification arguably requires mortality, but I'm not sure I know anyone who values evolution in that sense as compared to some other mechanism that makes equally valuable changes in the population (e.g. via technology).

Some people do seem to have goals that involve killing other people; presumably eliminating mortality prevents them from achieving those goals.

Are there any secular goals that are only achievable through the continuing mortality of humans?

Well -- "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." ; more colloquially "Science progresses one funeral at a time."

If we postulate that for any given level of scientific progress there are a number of existential risks it is not yet capable of addressing, it may well turn out that ubiquitous clinical immortality poses an existential risk to the human race.

Definitely a problem that needs addressing.