The Speculist

As we come to understand the brain better, it can be hoped that one day treatments will be available for people like Tammet to help them function more normally. His reliance on a rigid schedule for daily activities makes it difficult for him to function in a normal work setting. Even so, Tammet is a highly functional autistic--able to communicate with others and to make a living from his special abilities. Others with autism are not so fortunate, often living in complete isolation from the world around them.

This raises an interesting question. If Tammet's savant abilities are indeed a form of compensation for his autism, what might he do if offered the choice of giving up his special abilities in order to lead a " normal " life? The optimist in me hopes that a better understanding of the brain will lead us to a day when autism is cured and all people — or at least all of us who desire it — will have access to our own savant capabilities. But that may not prove to be the case, at least without significant augmentation of the brain.

Consider these savant abilities as described in the Guardian article:

Peek can read two pages simultaneously, one with each eye. He can also recall, in exact detail, the 7,600 books he has read.

The blind American savant Leslie Lemke played Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No1, after he heard it for the first time, and he never had so much as a piano lesson.

[T]he British savant Stephen Wiltshire was able to draw a highly accurate map of the London skyline from memory after a single helicopter trip over the city.

If given a choice, how many savants would sacrifice those kinds of abilities in favor of better socialization skills?

Randall Parker has written extensively about new treatments that promise enhancement of the human brain as well as the ability to control behavior more fully than ever before. If we reach a day in which individuals can pick and choose special mental abilities — even at a cost — wouldn't there be many who would gladly sacrifice normal social interaction in favor of such exceptional abilities?

I'm reminded of one of the futures described by science-fiction writer Greg Egan. In one of Eagan's stories, we read about people who have had not a sex change, but sex removal. They live completely without sex or gender. They even have their own pronoun, "ve" which is applied only to nonsexuals. One of these characters explains that ve has given up sex not only as a practice but as an identity precisely in order to avoid the kinds of needless emotional entanglements that a sexual being is forced to deal with.

One of the linchpins of what I've described as the tiresome argument is the question of what it means to be human. A potential shortcoming of the philosophical position that

living human organism = human being

is that we will one day share this planet with other intelligences, beings who could not pass a biological test for humanity but who would pass cognitive or emotional tests. Such creatures will seem very "human" to us and, more importantly, to themselves. Whether they arrive at that state through the evolution of machine intelligence or the engineering of some other species, they will pose--I hope--a real philosophical problem for those who would define humanity in strictly biological terms. Moreover, beings who are biologically human but who have deliberately removed from themselves some of the cognitive or behavioral tiles that make up the mosaic that we call humanity will pose a very different set of problems.

Just as autistic savants help us to re-conceptualize what we mean when we say someone is "disabled" or "gifted" these new classes of intelligent beings will lead us to a newer, fuller understanding of what it means to be human.

(via GeekPress)