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.
Earplugs: imperfect, uncomfortable, annoying to “turn on and off” and gross. And, I suppose, that in many social contexts using them could end up causing you to be labeled a passive-agressive weirdo. Headphones are better in some ways and worse in others. I think they provide weaker isolation and require you to actually listen to music if you want to really stop hearing outside stuff but I never had high-end headphones so I don’t actually know.
No, it doesn’t. It would only sound that way if the claim were that deafness is better on net (as is claimed of mortality), rather than pointing out one particular benefit of being deaf.
(Minor nitpick: people labeled “deaf” can still pick up very low-frequency vibrations, and if they’re next to a really wild party, can still get annoyed by the bass. Similarly, people with “no light perception” still get fried by lasers.)
I don’t think that is absolutely true. Consider the following policy followed by Omega:
“Whenever life is discovered on a planet, all the life is extinguished and the planet is destroyed.”
Where are the good consequences of such a policy? This reminds me of “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” an aphorism meant to make people feel better but not actually based on fact. Ask a polio victim if they’re feeling stronger.
Less pain on that planet. Depending on the extermination method, possibly awesome fireworks.
The badly dehydrated do love getting water, but no one (?) seeks to be badly dehydrated. Those who were dehydrated and say it was wonderful but do not lock themselves away from water frequently are probably expressing sour grapes towards those who never went without water for days. The pleasure of getting the water is still real.
These sound a lot like the rationalizations used to justify why death is a good thing.
Actually—the senses we use to shape our map of the world in a very strong sense alter the ways in which we understand the world. It has long been demonstrated that in patients who lack a specific sense, the neural mass normally dedicated to that sense begins to “bleed over” into the remaining senses, giving them more ‘processing power’ than would otherwise normally be the case. What this, in turn, means is that the perceptual world of a deaf or blind person is very strongly different from the one that we who have all five senses would otherwise understand or know.
What does all of this imply? The deaf truly perceive the world in ways that we who have all of our senses cannot today comprehend, in any true sense—though we can extrapolate from considering cases such as color-blindness; I can imagine that to a deaf person I am effectively color-blind to a whole range of visual depth that I can no more know than could a profoundly color-blind person ‘know’ the reality of red and green being profoundly separate colors.
In restoring hearing to such a person, if we are to truly argue that such a thing would be solely augmentative in nature, we should endeavor to ensure that such depth of perceptual capability was not lost in the process.
As a diagnosed autist, I very often wonder what it would be like to be what many of those of my condition refer to as “neurotypical”. But I definitely would never want to live my life as ‘one of you’; I am quite proud of the insights and demonstrably variant modes of thinking my condition has granted me.
As a transhumanist, I very often find that the notion of neurodiversity; of having the freedom to define for one’s own self what one’s cognitive processes should be shaped after, at any given time, is a more realizable near-term goal (morally, if not technically). It bypasses many of these problems.
Deafness is not death. If you die, you can’t do anything at all, because there isn’t a you left to speak of.
If you cannot hear, but you can communicate linguistically, and you did not recently lose hearing in a traumatic fashion, your hedonic set-point incorporates that fact. Acquiring a sense of hearing if you don’t have one already is non-trivial and often imperfect; it also does not make it easier to speak in a way others will react to normally (many hearing people listen to the voices of deaf people speaking aloud and subconsciously dehumanize or belittle them since their speech often sounds awkward to someone used to hearing/fluent speakers of their native language). So even then their problems don’t go away, and social acceptance is not total.
As an autistic person with serious auditory sensitivities, I can see the draw of being able to shut down my sense of hearing voluntarily. If I lost it (I may as I age; there’s some family history) I think I’d just prefer to bank against that possibility by learning ASL now, which—bonus! -- gives me some linguistic access to interacting with people I’d find difficult to talk to before, rather than get a cochlear implant or a hearing aid.
Neurally, this is true; they possess the same amount of gray matter dedicated to processing sensory input but it has fewer signals to work with. We who possess all five senses can do something similar by using sensory-deprivation tools to note the “sharpening” of a particular sense we pay attention to.
In terms of apparatus, however, simply being deaf doesn’t suddenly eliminate near-sightedness.
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.
Behold The Future!
Earplugs: imperfect, uncomfortable, annoying to “turn on and off” and gross. And, I suppose, that in many social contexts using them could end up causing you to be labeled a passive-agressive weirdo. Headphones are better in some ways and worse in others. I think they provide weaker isolation and require you to actually listen to music if you want to really stop hearing outside stuff but I never had high-end headphones so I don’t actually know.
I’d pay for earlids, especially if they came with a shut-in-case-of-loud-noise reflex.
These sound a lot like the rationalizations used to justify why death is a good thing.
No, it doesn’t. It would only sound that way if the claim were that deafness is better on net (as is claimed of mortality), rather than pointing out one particular benefit of being deaf.
(Minor nitpick: people labeled “deaf” can still pick up very low-frequency vibrations, and if they’re next to a really wild party, can still get annoyed by the bass. Similarly, people with “no light perception” still get fried by lasers.)
Every net good policy has some bad consequences. Every net bad policy has some good consequences.
I don’t think that is absolutely true. Consider the following policy followed by Omega: “Whenever life is discovered on a planet, all the life is extinguished and the planet is destroyed.” Where are the good consequences of such a policy? This reminds me of “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” an aphorism meant to make people feel better but not actually based on fact. Ask a polio victim if they’re feeling stronger.
Less pain on that planet. Depending on the extermination method, possibly awesome fireworks.
The badly dehydrated do love getting water, but no one (?) seeks to be badly dehydrated. Those who were dehydrated and say it was wonderful but do not lock themselves away from water frequently are probably expressing sour grapes towards those who never went without water for days. The pleasure of getting the water is still real.
Actually—the senses we use to shape our map of the world in a very strong sense alter the ways in which we understand the world. It has long been demonstrated that in patients who lack a specific sense, the neural mass normally dedicated to that sense begins to “bleed over” into the remaining senses, giving them more ‘processing power’ than would otherwise normally be the case. What this, in turn, means is that the perceptual world of a deaf or blind person is very strongly different from the one that we who have all five senses would otherwise understand or know.
What does all of this imply? The deaf truly perceive the world in ways that we who have all of our senses cannot today comprehend, in any true sense—though we can extrapolate from considering cases such as color-blindness; I can imagine that to a deaf person I am effectively color-blind to a whole range of visual depth that I can no more know than could a profoundly color-blind person ‘know’ the reality of red and green being profoundly separate colors.
In restoring hearing to such a person, if we are to truly argue that such a thing would be solely augmentative in nature, we should endeavor to ensure that such depth of perceptual capability was not lost in the process.
As a diagnosed autist, I very often wonder what it would be like to be what many of those of my condition refer to as “neurotypical”. But I definitely would never want to live my life as ‘one of you’; I am quite proud of the insights and demonstrably variant modes of thinking my condition has granted me.
As a transhumanist, I very often find that the notion of neurodiversity; of having the freedom to define for one’s own self what one’s cognitive processes should be shaped after, at any given time, is a more realizable near-term goal (morally, if not technically). It bypasses many of these problems.
Deafness is not death. If you die, you can’t do anything at all, because there isn’t a you left to speak of.
If you cannot hear, but you can communicate linguistically, and you did not recently lose hearing in a traumatic fashion, your hedonic set-point incorporates that fact. Acquiring a sense of hearing if you don’t have one already is non-trivial and often imperfect; it also does not make it easier to speak in a way others will react to normally (many hearing people listen to the voices of deaf people speaking aloud and subconsciously dehumanize or belittle them since their speech often sounds awkward to someone used to hearing/fluent speakers of their native language). So even then their problems don’t go away, and social acceptance is not total.
Not the same thing as rationalizing death.
As an autistic person with serious auditory sensitivities, I can see the draw of being able to shut down my sense of hearing voluntarily. If I lost it (I may as I age; there’s some family history) I think I’d just prefer to bank against that possibility by learning ASL now, which—bonus! -- gives me some linguistic access to interacting with people I’d find difficult to talk to before, rather than get a cochlear implant or a hearing aid.
They also tend to have better vision than hearing people, I believe.
Neurally, this is true; they possess the same amount of gray matter dedicated to processing sensory input but it has fewer signals to work with. We who possess all five senses can do something similar by using sensory-deprivation tools to note the “sharpening” of a particular sense we pay attention to.
In terms of apparatus, however, simply being deaf doesn’t suddenly eliminate near-sightedness.