From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Mar 18 2003 - 14:40:07 MST
Amara Graps wrote:
>
> It's a common idea for people not familiar with the naturist ideas
> to think that it is about how one looks without clothes. That's
> a mistake, though. It's about being comfortable inside one's body.
>
> Consider this: if one can't accept their human body (accepting
> 'what is' comes before choosing to make changes), do you think
> that they can accept their transhuman body? The answer is No.
Amara, while I'm in general agreement with your sentiments here, the last
sentence is a pure non sequitur. The pragmatic truth is that plenty of
people who can't stand their current bodies would be quite happy with a
Primo 3M. Yes, genuinely happy.
As a reductio ad absurdum, consider any transgender. Would the woman/man
inexplicably condemned by fate to live as a man/woman still suffer from
those hangups with a genuine female/male body? No, they'd live happily
ever after. So it goes.
There's something to be said for Zen, but there's also something to be
said for people learning to be serene *after* the pain goes away. Death
is a problem, so people fear it; now they have two problems. *Two*
problems. Not *one*. Death doesn't stop being a problem because fear of
death is also a problem; the two are independent. Which is more urgent?
Death, of course. As for the second problem, will people get over their
fear of death a lot faster once death is no longer a problem? Yes, of
course they will. And no, this isn't "cheating".
The moral is that people will learn to accept beautiful bodies as easily
as ugly ones. Today they have *two* problems, and one of them makes it a
lot harder to get started on the other one.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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