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.
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.