Alyssa Reads Memory Blunting: Ethical Analysis- suffering and authenticity

I read "Memory Blunting: Ethical Analysis" by the President's Council on Bioethics, excerpted from Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness (2003) and appearing in Neuroethics: An Introduction with Readings, edited by Martha J. Farah. I did so because I am taking a neuroethics class and we're supposed to show that we're thinking about neuroethics stuff at least a bit outside class. Also because I'm super-interested in how neuro-stuff (especially neurodivergence but really all things neuro-) is represented in fiction (especially young adult speculative fiction.) I'm pretty much chucking my notes (drawn parallels, expressions of annoyance, and the occasional "OK that's legitimate") on my blog because as important as a lab notebook is, I like notes that are typed and searchable. I started with some connections to Allegiant, then some thoughts on collective effects of blunting trauma, and then cognitive liberty. Now here's suffering and authenticity.

The concerns about what we might do to others minds if it were an issue of what person X does/chooses for person X, not what we are choosing for others. The concern seems to be about changing someone's true self, so suffering and authenticity come in again, just like cognitive liberty. These two seem frequently connected to me. If we recognize that people get to define their own "true selves", we don't get to moralize over which experiences are real and true anymore, which kind of kills the "not their true self" argument. Which is an argument I'm really not a fan of, especially considering which experiences it tends to be applied to.

This quote ... gives me the noble suffering/virtuous suffering sort of feeling, where whatever positive you might (not will, might) drag from the hell you go through means you shouldn't try to avoid that hell or save others from going through it.

Or will he succeed, over time, in 'redeeming' those painful memories by actively integrating them into the narrative of his life. By 'rewriting' memories pharmacologically, we might succeed in easing real suffering at the risk of falsifying our perceptions of the world and undermining our true identity. (90)

The version of a person that went through more bad things isn't automatically more real. The version of a person that's suicidal from trauma isn't automatically more real than the version of a person that takes medication to not be suicidal. Our choices define us, not just what we've been through, and using chemicals to get the parts of our histories we never chose to back the heck off? That's not less real. Suffering isn't the only way to be real. Enough of the noble suffering narrative. Enough.

Now to bring back a quote that I also talked about with cognitive autonomy:

And yet, there may be a great cost to acting compassionately for those who suffer bad memories, if we do so by compromising the truthfulness of how they remember. We risk having them live falsely in order to cope, surviving by whatever means possible. (92)

  (Survival is resistance etc)

And the concerns about what happens if we take out everything difficult? Those take a huge slippery slope argument, and not the kind where we've seen from experience that most people stop early or don't stop at all (destructive obedience is one of those.) Trauma is not the same thing as everything difficult in a person's life. Having to spend a lot of time and effort on reading and writing in order to become a good writer is not the same as witnessing a murder or being mugged or being a victim of abuse. One of these things is a choice: we're not under any obligation to become good writers. The other's aren't choices. They're things that happen to us. How we deal with the results is at least partially a choice. (Not entirely. Especially when, due to technological or social constraints, dulling the pain while working through it isn't an option.) There is plenty of opportunity for hard work and achievement without forcing others to keep horrors in their heads for the sake of ill-defined authenticity.

Alyssa Reads Memory Blunting: Ethical Analysis- cognitive liberty

 I read "Memory Blunting: Ethical Analysis" by the President's Council on Bioethics, excerpted from Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness (2003) and appearing in Neuroethics: An Introduction with Readings, edited by Martha J. Farah. I did so because I am taking a neuroethics class and we're supposed to show that we're thinking about neuroethics stuff at least a bit outside class. Also because I'm super-interested in how neuro-stuff (especially neurodivergence but really all things neuro-) is represented in fiction (especially young adult speculative fiction.) I'm pretty much chucking my notes (drawn parallels, expressions of annoyance, and the occasional "OK that's legitimate") on my blog because as important as a lab notebook is, I like notes that are typed and searchable. I started with some connections to Allegiant, then some thoughts on collective effects of blunting trauma. Now here's cognitive liberty.

The concerns about what we might do to others minds if it were an issue of what person X does/chooses for person X, not what we are choosing for others. Cognitive liberty. We don't seem to have a coherent definition of the self, and autonomy is complicated, but there is definitely a thing where a person either is or is not making the decisions about interventions taken (or not taken) on their own minds. Also on how folks define their own "true selves." What about who you are is important to you? Not what's important to me about who you are. Of course, that would stop us from moralizing over what experiences other people have are real and true vs. somehow fake. Changing one's own cognition by one's own choice isn't as acceptable as I think it should be. 

And yet, there may be a great cost to acting compassionately for those who suffer bad memories, if we do so by compromising the truthfulness of how they remember. We risk having them live falsely in order to cope, surviving by whatever means possible. (92)

Again, we do to them. Not, we offer them the option. Do we think we know better than them what's right for them? That way lies all sorts of abuse "for their own good." And ... do we really think everyone would choose to dull the pain of a memory or to forget it (remember also that those two things are not the same.) Because I don't think that. I think lots of people would, but not everyone. Despite (because of?) my arguments about cognitive autonomy leaning towards letting people choose to blunt the trauma,  I want the right to remember in my relatively unchanged way. It's just that the arguments run towards why everyone needs to be doing it that way, and I don't believe everyone needs to be remembering that way. I think enough people would choose to remember that we'd get whatever collective benefits the memory would provide, even if we let people choose to dull their pain. Not that I think the supposed benefits are nearly as strong as seems to be argued. Intentional ignorance is already a thing.

Alyssa Reads Memory Blunting: Ethical Analysis- collective effects

I read "Memory Blunting: Ethical Analysis" by the President's Council on Bioethics, excerpted from Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness (2003) and appearing in Neuroethics: An Introduction with Readings, edited by Martha J. Farah. I did so because I am taking a neuroethics class and we're supposed to show that we're thinking about neuroethics stuff at least a bit outside class. Also because I'm super-interested in how neuro-stuff (especially neurodivergence but really all things neuro-) is represented in fiction (especially young adult speculative fiction.) I'm pretty much chucking my notes (drawn parallels, expressions of annoyance, and the occasional "OK that's legitimate") on my blog because as important as a lab notebook is, I like notes that are typed and searchable. I started with some connections to Allegiant. Now here's thoughts about the collective effects of forgetting, as worried about by the authors (and as I tend to think we deal with even without dulling memories pharmacologically.)

I have a concern about this supposed legal argument against using beta blockers or similar medications to reduce the emotional impact or trauma from publicly important events. (The given example was a terrorist attack. I can ... kind of tell this was written not too long after 9/11.)  The idea is that it's important to have some witnesses remember the event accurately. There's a problem: I remember from my introductory neurobiology class that when a memory is super emotional, we feel quite certain of our recollection ... but that we can still be completely wrong in our memory of what happened. Ask people where they were on 9/11, or when the space shuttle exploded, and some will tell you they were listening to or watching other events that didn't happen on those days. Sometimes didn't even happen that time of year. But we are confidently wrong! So as useful as accurate recollection would be for legal purposes, maintaining the traumatic impact on the witnesses doesn't make accurate recall happen anyways. Also, eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable to begin with. This is a bad argument because the thing we're claiming to want to preserve already doesn't exist.

On that note, I wish the authors had said something more about the social and personal effects of blunting our collective traumas. I'm not entirely convinced that leg of the argument is going to hold either. After all, I'm a Jewish (and Queer, and Disabled) descendant of Holocaust survivors, and I know how we're never supposed to forget. I'd be a lot more inclined to buy into the value of collectively remembering and the consequences of forgetting if we'd stopped having genocide or deciding that certain religions are inherently more dangerous or lesser. But we didn't. These things all still happen. The things we're claiming to want to prevent already happen with our supposed preventative in place, and that means I don't trust the argument.

The murder witness example actually does concern me. "Yes, I was there. But it wasn't so terrible." (91). We don't want murder to be thought of as not so terrible. I know we don't want that because sometimes it is already considered not so terrible. See also: "mercy" killings of disabled people by the folks who are supposed to take care of them. It already just depends on the choice of victim, and that's terrifying. I don't want the idea of murder as not so terrible spreading any further than it has. I want it gone. I want all the murders being recognized as being as bad as they are.

I also have issues with the juxtaposition (and sometimes what seems like conflation) of giving a victim relief and medicating away (or relieving, I suppose I should use the same language for each) the guilt of perpetrators. Those are not morally equivalent. Victims and attackers or abusers are not the same. When we're talking about a mutual conflict, as in the case of war (the most talked about cause of PTSD, but far from the only one), there may not be a clear aggressor or victim. There also may be. It depends on what's going on, really (and remember how often the military is painted as the only way out for people in poverty, at the same time we remember the atrocities soldiers often commit.) Still, when we're talking about accidents and survivors of terrorist attacks, there's clear innocents. (Not "perfect victims" in the sense that they never did anything else even slightly wrong, but innocent in the sense that they didn't choose what happened to cause the trauma.)

Jobs for autistic strengths and "autistic strengths"

Full disclosure: Real Social Skills got me thinking about this with some tweets (first tweet, second tweet, third tweet), and then a blog post, both of which I think you should read. That said, I think my thoughts are parallel rather than identical and it's still worth my writing my bit.

To me, what she's saying reads a few main points:

• Some models of autistic strengths assume that attention to/liking of detail is one of the strengths.
  
• They then assume this means we will enjoy repetitive, detail-oriented jobs most people find mundane.
  
• That's still putting us into different sorts of jobs than everyone else (segregation!) but calling it strengths based and assuming we're all the same.

Since this is May 1 (Blogging Against Disablism Day), I've got some "spot the (dis)abl(e)ism" thoughts. Let's break those down. Here's what I'm reasonably certain isn't ableism:

• Thinking it's a good idea to play to an autistic person's strengths does not read like ableism to me.
  
• Recognizing that some strengths may be statistically common in autistic people does not read like ableism to me.
  
•  Understanding that the jobs we find interesting or want to do may be different from what "most people" find interesting or want to do does not read like ableism to me.

Helping an autistic person find a job that's a good fit for them based on their (autistic, since they are autistic and autism is pervasive,) strengths would also not read like ableism to me It would be helping someone find a job for their autistic strengths. Unfortunately,  the way programs around finding jobs for "autistic strengths" often run ... does have ableism involved.

• Assuming that "autistic strengths" means exactly a certain set of (perhaps statistically common) strengths is treating us as a monolith, and therefore ableism. Not all autistic people are detail-oriented, for example. (I appear to be a lot more detail-oriented than I really am thanks to pattern-recognition.)
  
• Assuming that a given strength will correspond to a given interest is stereotyping based on interests. If you're only doing this in the presence of an assumed disability, it's ableism. If not ... it's still inaccurate stereotyping but it might not be ableism?
  
• Celebrating how we can therefore do these jobs other people find boring and pushing us into those jobs is effectively workplace segregation, definitely stereotyping based on autism, and therefore ableism.

And this is what a lot of autism employment programs seem to be doing. It's not what we need. My jobs? Based on my actual strengths, some of which are a bit stereotypical and some of which are decidedly not. Math? Yeah, I'm good at that and I like it. People tend not to be surprised by that one. Grading? I guess that involves attention to detail, or pattern recognition that makes breaks in expected patterns stand out. Teaching? Seems a bit social, yes? Well, explaining things to people in ways they can understand is absolutely part of my skill set. As a student, I often explain math-heavy neuroscience papers to my non-math classmates in the neuroscience program. As a teacher, it means finding the way to explain a given concept that actually makes sense to my students. I don't think any autism employment program is going to suggest that a person who can't always talk become a teacher, but that's what I do. Editing? I guess it's attention to detail, but it's also language. None of my work has been in areas typically considered "boring," and a lot of the work people consider "boring"? Really wouldn't be a good fit for me. Assuming it must work for me because I'm autistic isn't going to work. I'm an Autistic person, not a machine made of autism stereotypes. 

Thank blob April is almost over

Today is the last day of April. For family reasons, I wasn't online all that much in the last week and a half of the month (this was good and I should probably arrange to spend as much of April as possible too busy to be online in the future, except for the part where if I'm that busy I am also working towards a burnout and I need to fall the heck over now.)

Even so, autism nonsense and attention paid to it tended to be at a high. Sometimes this is useful. Like when one of our own needs a social media crisis thrown against a discrimination issue: Niko won a competition for a trip but doesn't get to go because of his disability.

Sometimes it's frustrating: do I really need to answer for the n+1st time that I am an autistic person, not a person with autism? There exists a cat named autism because autistic humor is a thing, but I do not live with this cat. Do I need to explain for the n+1st time that no, I don't think organization XYZ can be reformed in a way that would make it helpful for autistic people? (Organization XYZ is usually, but not always, Autism Speaks.)

Sometimes it's scary: I don't really need to be reminded just how far many parents are willing to go in order to "get their child back" from this scary autism thing, or what they do when nothing "works." I don't need all the reminders of why I'm scared for (not of, for,) autistic kids today. (A lot of other people do seem to need the reminder, but they don't seem to be the ones getting it, or understanding why this is scary.)

And it drops back to somewhat normal levels tomorrow.