there was a top post on reddit yesterday about a woman with body integrity identity disorder - she wanted to be blind, but she was sighted. so she blinded herself, and was then much happier.
The comments were outraged. They were not outraged at the prospect she’d avail of services meant for blind people who didn’t choose it - that I would have expected, though I think it’d have been mistaken. They were not outraged that she could have Contributed To Society more as a sighted person - which would, I think, have been untrue, since she was much happier and more productive once she had what she wanted. The outrage was that, instead of treating her mental illness* that made her want to be blind, she changed her body so it was the way she wanted it to be.Â
Our brains are us - preferences and gut intuitions and goals and memories and all. Our bodies are the interface we use to interact with the world. And yet a ton of people seem to think that it’s morally better to change our brains to like our current bodies than to change our bodies to be however the hell we want them. And worse than that, a ton of people seem to think that there’s an objectively correct type of body to have, and it’s basically the body of an able-bodied human, and wanting anything else is inherently a mental illness,Â
Eliezer once said that transhumanism is the radical notion that good things are good and bad things are bad. I think it’s even simpler than that. Transhumanism is the radical notion that our bodies are ours, and if we want them to be different we can and should change them. It is the radical notion that if someone wants to be blind, and makes themself blind, and then leads a more productive or fulfilling life as a blind person, then just maybe that was a good outcome.Â
Also discussed in the comments was the general plight of people with BIID, who apparently often want limbs amputated and can’t find a surgeon who will amputate a “perfectly healthy” limb no matter how much it’d improve the patient’s quality of life. Bodies over brains again. Treating the wrong parts of us as sacred.Â
I’ve heard the same thing from people who want to get sterilized, from people who want (or who don’t want) a treatment for a disability of theirs, and of course from people who want to medically transition. “Have you considered getting therapy for that preference, instead of just getting it fulfilled?”Â
Transhumanism is the radical notion that you are your brain and you own your body. Everything else - supporting the choice of disabled people to refuse a cure, supporting people who want to be sterilized and protecting people who are sterilized agains their will, supporting gender transition, developing awesome new robot bodies that are superior to meat ones, uploading our brains onto silicon so they can do more cool stuff, putting magnets in our fingertips, whatever - follows from that.
* I don’t generally think describing preferences as mental illnesses is useful, especially if the preference has now been fulfilled and is not interfering with the person’s other goals. I also think mentally ill people deserve exactly as much autonomy as everyone else so even if this woman was, in fact, mentally ill that should be about as relevant as whether she likes ice cream.Â
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