Face Donation
Posted by Peter W. Schramm
We’re back from Arnn’s place. Had a great Thanksgiving. The first thing I notice on returning was this article from the London Independent on the possibility of transplanting a face from a dead person to a living person. The report is from the meeting of the British Association of Plastic Surgeons. It is shocking. Yet, we should be prepared for more such shocks.
5:55 PM / November 29, 2002
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What is it about something that makes it shocking? Within 50 years people will be uploading themselves on computers. Pundits are always looking around and realising new security threats. Within a close enough circle of those who know a certain field, nothing is suprising when it happens. It is probably true however that nothing will have as extreme of an impact as those in the field believe. Middle America probably finds a lot of things shocking. The thing is that while in a given field those who consider repercussions usually end up seeing the most favorable and adverse probabilities cancel each other out in practice. Thus, in the field they work in they consider the end result to be quite moderate. The aggregate end result however is that they are still shocked by the developements in other fields. The existence of this shock is itself shocking, it seems like a cheap type of moral outcry, similar, despite having the opposite foundation of Hobbesian laughter.