[Previous: Models of Neurodivergence.]
Materialism. The first principle of the transhumanist model of neurodivergence is that there is no soul. There is no distinction between my brain and my me. There is no homunculus floating somewhere around in my head making decisions that aren’t a product of my brain chemistry. Everything we feel, think, say, or do is a product of the interactions of neurons and, ultimately, of atoms banging into each other.
This means that, contra the medical model, there is no difference between mental illness and character flaw. You can’t be like “well, it’s a mental illness if it’s because of your brain chemistry”. Every emotion– from the most functional or typical to the least– is a product of brain chemistry.
It’s no secret that a lot of mental health diagnosis is sort of arbitrary. Look at the Beck Depression Inventory. There’s no particular reason why, if Alice and Bob are identical except that Alice circled “I cry more than I used to” and Bob circled “I cry all the time now”, Alice should be classified as “borderline depression” and Bob “moderate depression.” But you have to draw the line somewhere, and that’s where they chose to draw the line.
Even more so, it seems probable to me that some disorders, such as generalized anxiety disorder, actually are the extreme end of normal human variation– a quantitative difference rather than a qualitative difference. Some people are very easy going and don’t worry at all; some people worry sometimes and not other times; and some people worry constantly. But the thing is that worrying constantly usually makes people unhappy and makes it harder for them to do things, so we have decided that worrying way more than average is a mental disorder and gives you access to therapy and medication. This is not exactly what one would call a well-grounded distinction.
The materialism point is not to say that we shouldn’t criticize people for character flaws. Sometimes criticism is an effective way of changing behavior. However, criticism is also an effective way of changing some behavior caused by neurodivergence: I myself am a lot less likely to get depressed when I’m going to be criticized for not doing the self-care things that prevent depression. And it is an ineffective way of changing a lot of behavior not considered mentally ill: yelling at someone for being normally forgetful often doesn’t help them be less forgetful.
Fuck ‘normal function’. Transhumanism is based on the recognition that just because an impairment is common doesn’t mean it’s good. Perhaps the worst impairment of all– death– is one every human will face. (So far. Growth mindset!) Normal humans can’t spin off subagents to work on particular tasks, add twelve-digit numbers in their heads, avoid confabulating memories, or change their minds as much as they should in response to new evidence. These impairments are just as important as more uncommon impairments such as ADD.
All too often, the impairments that are medicalized are not the ones that are the worst: they’re the ones that are the least common. If everyone could avoid memory confabulation, the people who confabulated would be considered psychotic. Since everyone does it, it is a normal part of life. But I see no reason that the morally relevant criterion for whether an impairment should exist should be popularity.
Morphological freedom. Eliezer writes in Prolegomena to a Theory of Fun:
In the era of my foolish youth, when I went into an affective death spiral around intelligence, I thought that the mysterious “right” thing that any superintelligence would inevitably do, would be to upgrade every nearby mind to superintelligence as fast as possible. Intelligence was good; therefore, more intelligence was better…
But the real break came when I naturalized my understanding of morality, and value stopped being a mysterious attribute of unknown origins.
Then if there was no outside light in the sky to order me to do things—
The thought occurred to me that I didn’t actually want to bloat up immediately into a superintelligence, or have my world transformed instantaneously and completely into something incomprehensible. I’d prefer to have it happen gradually, with time to stop and smell the flowers along the way.
I mention this not to make any point about intelligence increase after the Singularity, but to point out that people can, in fact, value being weaker than they could otherwise be. Eliezer Yudkowsky (at least) doesn’t want to immediately bloat up into a superintelligence. And by the principle that all impairments are equal, this means that some people can value having the suboptimal brains they currently have. I value my strong emotions; this is no different than Eliezer valuing his sub-superintelligence IQ.
So, therefore, the transhumanist model of neurodivergence embraces “morphological freedom.” Morphological freedom means that I decide how I want to change or not change my own body and brain; my informed consent is all that is required to cause a particular change.
This means that if you have a normal-human brain and want to have a better one, it is okay for you to use medications and other interventions to get there. If you want to take modafinil so you sleep less or work better, you have a perfect right to do so. Similarly, if you think therapy will help you understand yourself or deal with some subclinical issue like procrastination, there is nothing wrong with seeking therapy.
On the other hand, it means that I have a right to refuse intervention. You can refuse intervention because the side effects are too bad: for instance, not taking antidepressants because you dislike sexual side effects. You can also refuse it because you value your brain being a particular way: for instance, many autistic people genuinely don’t want to be nonautistic, and it is morally wrong to make them such.
Morphological freedom does permit stabilization. If someone is disconnected from reality and hasn’t left a mental illness advance directive, then it may be justified to give them medications until they’re connected to reality enough that you can ask what their preferences are. (However, if someone in sound mind prefers to be psychotic, they should be allowed to do so.) In addition, morphological freedom may permit discouraging people from using addictive substances (including by making them illegal): if a substance is addictive, then people may be using it for reasons other than their own best interests.
Finally, morphological freedom does not mean that doctors can’t help: I might know that I want to have a particular brain state, but I don’t know how to get there, and psychiatrists, psychologists, and so on may play an important role as expert consultants.
Accommodation. The transhumanist model of neurodivergence accepts the social model’s distinction between impairment and disability. If no one can spin off subagents to work on problems, then (for obvious reasons) you aren’t going to have a society that requires people to be able to do that. But if people could, then the hypothetical person who couldn’t would suddenly have a lot of difficulty finding a job.
Our society should strive to accommodate everyone’s impairments as best it can given current technology. There are two reasons for this. First, we cannot fix every impairment, and since there is no moral difference between uncommon impairments and common impairments, there is no reason that common impairments should be more accommodated (beyond the ordinary considerations of tradeoffs).
Second, the right to change your brain in any way you like is not a particularly useful right if, when you change your brain the way you like, you proceed to starve to death.
As I previously wrote in a tumblr post justifying anti-ableist activism:
when the posthumans come— when there are beings that think faster than us, know more, can alter their preferences and share their source code and branch into a thousand selves and merge again—
would you want them to change you, against your will, no matter how painful the changing is or what you value about yourself you would lose?
and if they couldn’t change you, would you want them to abandon you, lost, in a world full of signs you can’t see (everyone sees in ultraviolet) and conversations you can’t comprehend (everyone knows as much as Wikipedia) and sensations that overwhelm you (everyone likes noises as loud as a jet airline taking off), a world you can’t function in and can barely comprehend?
or would you want them to be kind?
and if you hope the posthumans— creatures unimaginably alien, unimaginably superior— would be kind, then how can you not justify being kind to those a little less optimal than you, right now?
And that is where I stand, as a transhumanist and a disability rights advocate.
Further Reading
Nick Bostrom, Transhumanist Values
Scott Alexander, Diseased Thinking: Dissolving Questions About Disease
Sarah Constantin, Errors vs. Bugs and the End of Stupidity
Liz Tarleton, Transhumanism and Disability
Ron Amundson, Against Normal Function
Feel free to share more resources you believe belong on this list!
Thing of Things 
What’s the point of transhumanism? The motivation is something like a combination of good-diet-and-exercise health improvement motivations and cognitive enhancement – more generally, to become happier through being able to do more. This obviously conflicts with inducing impairments in oneself, and, for that matter, maintaining currently normal human impairments. Because of a combination of Hayekian and other liberal principles we shouldn’t change others against their will, but it makes sense to someone who makes themselves less capable than they could’ve been otherwise as similar to someone who intentionally physically cripples themselves.
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*makes sense to see someone
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Have you ever played a videogame on any setting other than easy, without using cheat codes? If so, why did you cripple yourself by not using cheat codes?
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Annoyingly, some developers make bonus content only available on harder difficulties. And for obvious reasons, there are no cheats in multiplayer games. But other than that, yes, I do always play on the easiest difficulty and with cheats.
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You filthy, filthy casual.[/elitism]
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This argument proves too much. Is being able to choose not to work not a useful right if you would sometimes starve to death as a result? Is being able to no communicate with your partner not a particularly useful right if it leads to the end of a relationship? How far does this principle apply – if you intentionally destroy your ability to function by doing lots of drugs, are others obligated to support you when you’ve chosen to mess yourself up? Just because you have the right to do X doesn’t mean that others have to insulate you from the consequences of your choice.
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I support a guaranteed basic income, so… yes, actually.
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A guaranteed basic income isn’t enough for people who aren’t functional enough to spend their money in a way that keeps them alive. If they’re in that state through their own choices, should someone have to support them even more? If not, does that mean that the right to do lots of drugs isn’t very useful?
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I think a fair number of those cases are the product of addiction (which I already characterized as an exception to morphological freedom) or of actively desiring to die. If someone is incapable of handling money and neither suicidal nor an addict, it’s an empirical question what the appropriate accommodation is, and I’m not sure what the answer is.
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We’re getting away from the main point, which is that the only reason these people need accommodations is because of something they’ve chosen to do to themselves, and you’re arguing that unless they’d be accommodated for whatever they chose to do, they’re not really free to do it. But I think you’d agree that you really are free to do things even though they’d have negative consequences. You’re free to insult your friends, even though that’d have the negative consequence of them not talking to you, you’re free to eat nothing but ice cream, even though that’d be unhealthy, you’re free to spend all your money on toothpicks, though then you’d have nothing left over for food… Or would you argue that your friends are obligated to continue to interact with you even when you’re rude to them (otherwise, you’re not free to be rude), hospitals should provide you with care for whatever health complications that eating ice cream gave you (otherwise, you’re not free to eat nothing but ice cream), people are obligated to give you food if you spend all your money on toothpicks (otherwise, you’re not free to spend all your money on toothpicks)…?
Or, suppose we live in a world where everyone can walk without difficulty, and as a result there are no wheelchair ramps everywhere. Then, some people decide to exercise their morphological freedom by intentionally breaking their legs. Would everybody else be obligated to provide them with wheelchair ramps, when it’s their own fault that they need them?
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I think there is some tension between “accommodate everyone’s impairments as best it can” and “basic income”. Somewhere in the back of my mind a light labeled “moral hazard” is blinking. At some point a society that subscribes to this model may need some fairly clear guidelines about what accommodations are supererogatory lest they overburden everyone’s morphological freedom, although it is a bit much to expect the model itself to specify them.
Like most rights-like things, I would hope that this would at least in part be reflexively determined. Certainly we would want to avoid the moral hazard of anti-morphological-freedom people intentionally self-modifying to be exquisitely sensitive to other people’s neurodivergence so as to require additional accommodation from them.
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I worry about how much is being cached in “as best it can” here. Our current society uses a scarcity-based incentive system to motivate people to produce value (i.e. capitalism). Accommodation undermines this system. How much accommodation can we afford before it comes back to bite us in the ass?
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Lots of forms of accommodation– in fact, I would argue most– don’t undermine scarcity-based incentive systems at all. For instance, the use of concrete manipulatives to teach children math concepts, emailing people the slides from PowerPoint presentations, and allowing people to work from home sometimes are all forms of accommodation that, if anything, improve productivity.
And I support GBI, so…
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Yes, the less expensive accommodations are probably worth the cost. I am not persuaded that the set of all accommodations skews towards inexpensive ones (off the top of my head, renovating buildings to be more wheelchair friendly is prohibitively expensive). And you were giving examples of people who “can’t spin off subagents” in a society where people presumably some people can, and that sounds like several orders of magnitude of inefficiency to accommodate in a competitive market. If being bad at your job carries no penalties because society will accommodate your badness, why spend effort improving? And if no one’s good at their jobs, who’s making the value used to accommodate everyone’s ineptitude? Or are you silently assuming that tragedy will not befall your commons?
Guaranteed basic income does not solve this issue unless you assume a sufficiently materially wealthy society that it both can, and does, provide so much basic income that even expensive impairments are affordable, while still maintaining a stable economy by some other incentive. I don’t think we live in a society that can afford such. I don’t think we are likely to end up in such a society anytime soon, either. Unless robots really take off in the next 20 years, or something.
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If you support all the accommodations I listed, congratulations, you are already more pro-accommodations than most people, please collect your disability rights advocate badge.
I said that societies should accommodate people as best they can given their technology level. Post-scarcity and non-post-scarcity societies are obviously going to have different ability to accommodate people.
Can you give a specific example of the sort of “very expensive impairment” you are afraid of?
You seem to have the unusual idea that people will choose to become arbitrarily impaired if they are accommodated. Are you honestly telling me that if you were told “you can become dyslexic, but everything you need to read will be available as audio recordings”, you would become dyslexic?
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Funny how differently “scarcity as an incentive” caches out for different people in different circumstances, huh? “Work 12/7 or your child will starve” vs. “come up with a catchy ad slogan and get ten more grand towards a fancier car”
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“Eliezer Yudkowsky… sub-superintelligence IQ”
Burn the heretic.
On a serious note, is there a mental version of the term “morphological freedom?” Or a term than encompasses both body and mind?
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Shun the non-believer. Shun, Shuuuuuun.
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“In addition, morphological freedom may permit discouraging people from using addictive substances (including by making them illegal): if a substance is addictive, then people may be using it for reasons other than their own best interests.”
I think once this line is accepted the essay loses its force. You say we can stop people from doing things to their brain if its not in “their own best interests.” This means if “society” decides being autistic is not in someone’s best interests (or deaf, etc) we can stop them from being autistic/deaf/etc. And I am pretty sure most people do not think being deaf is in a person’s “Best interests” even if the deaf person says it is! And certainly most people would interpret your reasoning as justifying forcing treatment on deaf children!
I did really like the article aside from the stuff on addictive substances! I am vaguely in favor of banning certain drugs or at least regulating them. But I do not think anything besides legalizing all mind altering drugs fits your model of “morphological freedom.” If your ideal does not even let people take addictive drugs its really a stretch to say your model should allow people to remain seriously impaired. Especially since someone could say “you have to at least try being upgraded. Most people who are upgraded do not choose to go back to their old body/mind.”
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Hm. I believe most heroin users want not to use heroin but wind up doing so anyway because of their addictions; therefore, you can’t assume that their heroin use reflects a genuine desire to be heroin addicts, in the same way that you can assume that my use of modafinil reflects a genuine desire to take modafinil. I admit if most heroin users genuinely want to use heroin, then the case in favor of criminalization or discouraging heroin use is much much weaker.
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The notion of volition and, by extension, consent seems to require clarification/a new perspective in this case. Most heroin users do not want to go to jail either. The ethics of criminalisation remain to be teased out.
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The US government claims that 24% of heroine users are addicted. So even the US government thinks the majority of heroine users just want to use heroine. While the 24% number is “reasonable” what is actually true is that around 20-24% of people who used heroine in the last year used a problematically large amount. This could, of course, just reflect the fact that some of these users have a desire to use alot of heroine.
Also the first time you take heroine it must be out of a genuine desire to take heroine. And everyone knows there is a risk of addiction if you take heroine. So anyone who took heroine made a choice to take heroine and risk addiction. Should people only get “morphological freedom” if there are no irreversible consequences? Again this runs into consistency problems if you want to allow people to choice to be impaired as this may not always be fully reversible (lost socialization, wages will never recover etc). And I am 100% sure people will make the “irreversible consequences” of remaining “impaired” argument all the time.
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> a genuine desire to be heroin addicts
What does a “genuine desire” mean if not a desire of the “homunculus floating somewhere around in [the] head making decisions that aren’t a product of … brain chemistry”?
I think there is an idea to be steel-manned here, but at the moment we’ve got a contradiction.
See also (and possibly add to the “further reading” list) Consent in a Society of the Mind
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@Stargirlprincess:
Consider addiction as (somewhat) irreversible self-modification of preferences.
Consider ‘morphological freedom’ as control of preferences.
Choice to become addicted =~ God creating a rock so heavy even he cannot lift it?
I wish I could express this more coherently.
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I think there needs to be some concept of personal identity somewhere in the disease vs trait concept.
If someone crept into your house while you slept and cured your sexual disphoria, you’d probably wake up and say: “You bastard: how dare you meddle in my head?” But if that someone cured your not-being-Peter-Thiel, you (he?) would probably wake up and say: “You bastard: you murdered Ozy.”
It’s not a binary. There are things that are in between.
But for a mental attribute to qualify as a “disease”, I think it needs to be well to the changing-it-isn’t-death end of the spectrum.
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Something that’s help me think about this is tabooing terms like “same person” and replacing them with terms like “desirability of changes to one’s mind.” In this model “personal identity” essentially becomes “the portion of your utility function that ranks changes to your mind.”
It still generates the same intuitive results (i.e. don’t kill people who don’t want to die or wirehead people who don’t want to be wireheaded), but without all the headache of trying to define “same person.”
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I don’t think that matches my intuition. I could imagine willingly dying to bring someone better into the world. It still feels like dying.
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>I could imagine willingly dying to bring someone better into the world.
People tend to intuitively divide our preferences into two types. There is one type that we think of as our “wellbeing,” we intuitively think of ourselves as being made better off when these types preferences our fulfilled. Examples include wanting to read a book, be loved, have a good reputation, learn, etc.
There is another type that we think of as “morals,” or “principals.” We tend to not think of ourselves as being made better off when these preferences are fulfilled. If we reduce the fulfillment of your “wellbeing” preferences in order to increase the fulfillment of our “principals” preferences, we tend to think we personally have been made worse off, even if the world as a whole is a better place. For instance, if a soldier sacrifices his life to save one of his friends, we tend to consider him to be worse off than before, even though he obviously must have preferred for his friend to live.
Obviously both these types of preferences are commensurable, and can be fit together into a unified Von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function. But I think that our intuitive division of these preferences into two types is very important, and losing track of it makes it harder to think about your values.
With this framework in place, I can amend my earlier statement. Personal identity is the portion of one’s “wellbeing” type preferences that rank the desirability of changes to one’s mind. When you die in order to let a better person be created, you are reducing the fulfillment of you “wellbeing” type preferences in order to obtain greater fulfillment of your “principals” preference. So you are correct to say that it feels like dying, and it feels like harming yourself, because it is.
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It seems the basic question here is whether we can ever be justified in saying we know someone’s preferences better than they do. I think you want to say “no”, but are forced to give a qualified “yes”, which is where most of us end up. At that point it’s just a practical question of where the line should be drawn. (I agree that we should err on the side of caution more than we currently do.) A better example than drugs is suicide: I feel comfortable in saying that almost all healthy people who sincerely attempt suicide are making a mistake.
With superintelligence in the picture, it really gets complicated — it seems plausible that a superintelligence actually could model me (or future-me) better than I can, since the human mind is quite bad at self-modeling except in limited, socially relevant ways. Heck, our minds sometimes actively inhibit accurate self-modeling; confabulation is one example of this, but many universal biases and errors represent just such an inhibition. Evolution seems to have been more on the side of “fake it til you make it” than “know thyself”.
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>people can, in fact, value being weaker than they could otherwise be.
I can’t see how this is at all controversial if you think about it for a minute. People often do things that temporarily weaken themselves in order to obtain certain sorts of experiences. For instance, people bowl with a handicap, even though that makes them weaker compared to other players. There are lots of performers who deliberately make their routines harder to do for the sheer joy of it. There’s an entire page on TV Tropes for “Self-Imposed Challenge,” where someone deliberately impairs their ability to do things in order to enjoy the added challenge.
There are all sorts of impairments people can get enjoyment from. We just notice the “bad” impairments more, because they are usually permanent rather than temporary, and the hardships they cause outweigh any benefits they might confer; this makes them more salient when we talk about impairment.
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There seems to be a difference here about whether the value is in the winning or the taking part. In situations where the winning is secondary to the fun of playing, self-imposed challenges are often beneficial, whether for ballence or good old fashioned laughs (see: Dwarf Fortress); In situations where the activity is just a means to the reward (careers, ‘serious stuff’ in general), self-imposed challenges merely lessen the reward.
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Ozy hello!
Some commenters have pointed out the problems that might arise from collision of morphological freedom with the need for incentives in scarcity economics. Maybe the problem can be solved if we postulate that
1. People who were born with brain of type X have the right to be accommodated on the expense of society even if they chose not to modify into an economically superior brain of type Y.
2. People who were born with brain of type Y and chose to modify into an economically inferior brain of type X cannot expect to be compensated.
Of course in a future society with upgraded people, economics is probably going to be powerful enough to support guaranteed income anyway. But it might not be the case is present societies.
Regarding drugs, I second commenters who think your position on the issue seems inconsistent. If a person chose to use drugs in a sound mind, fully aware of the consequences, there seems to be little ground to stop her by force.
There is a situation where I think applying morphological freedom is almost certainly wrong. Namely, children don’t necessarily want to become adults (I mean mental changes rather than physical changes). Of course once they become adults they are happy with the transition but the same can be same of mind modifications which we would agree are horrendous. Nevertheless, I don’t think we should allow children choice in the matter.
Another case in which the case for morphological freedom is weaker is brain types which are inherently dangerous to other people (e.g. violent / homicidal types). Now, it can be argued that it’s better to confine a homicidal person than make her non-homicidal by force. On the other hand, it’s probably a good idea to outlaw modifications which transform people into super-skilled assassins.
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” Namely, children don’t necessarily want to become adults (I mean mental changes rather than physical changes). Of course once they become adults they are happy with the transition but the same can be same of mind modifications which we would agree are horrendous. Nevertheless, I don’t think we should allow children choice in the matter.”
as someone who desperately did not want, the mental changes of becoming an adult — now i am an adult. i really decidedly am not happy with this transition, i feel like my brain/mental state has lost something extremely valuable to me and important to my identity (…probably something to do with neuroplasticity, or whatever it is that allows a game of pretend to be all-encompassing) and if there was any possible way to go back i would take it in an instant. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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